Rembrandt and Other Figure Painters

Rembrandt Harmenz van Rijn was born in 1606, twenty-nine years after Peter Paul Rubens. He died in 1669, twenty-nine years after the death of Rubens. Rembrandt lived nearly all of his professional life in Amsterdam, one hundred miles north of Antwerp, the Flemish base of Rubens’s transnational career. 

Melville’s ancestral family had direct ties to the Golden Age of Dutch painting. When Harmense van Gansevoort (c. 1635-1740), Herman’s direct maternal ancestor, emigrated from Northern Europe to the future site of Albany, New York, in the late 1650s, Rembrandt, Teniers, van Ostade, Metsu, Ruisdeal, Cuyp, Hobbema, Wouvermans, and Teniers (and other Flemish and Dutch masters to be collected by Melville more than two hundred years later) were still alive and painting. The exact origins of Harmense van Gansevoort in the Old World are unknown; he appears to have emigrated either from the Gröningen area of the Netherlands or the Lippe area of Westphalia. What is known is that Herman’s mother Maria Gansevoort (1791-1872) grew up with a strong sense of Dutch heritage as a fifth-generation member of the Gansevoort clan in Albany. She passed this identification down to her children in the form of Dutch-language Bibles, the Dutch Reform Church, and the Dutch matron’s form of domestic “socialization” (Kenney 9, 161). 

As a young writer, Melville was already alluding to such Flemish and Dutch painters as Teniers and Wouvermans in Typee (211) and Mardi (42). His direct knowledge of such painters grew exponentially during his visits to the picture galleries of England in 1849, Italy in 1857, and  the Netherlands itself in 1857. By the time Melville was actively building a print collection in early 1870s, the brand-new Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was making Dutch Old Master paintings available to the general public in a way the city had never seen. In the inaugural exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1872, the majority of the paintings “belonged to the Dutch and Flemish schools, then perhaps the most coveted on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the Flemish works were paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and David Teniers the Younger. Among the Dutch were three pictures by Salomon van Ruysdeal, a landscape by Jan van Goyen, and a portrait then thought to be by Franz Hals” (Quodbach 5). 

In its 2007-08 exhibition The Age of Rembrandt, the Metropolitan Museum displayed all its Dutch paintings according to the successive years in which they were acquired. In the early rooms of the exhibition one could walk with Melville, as it were, among the paintings that would have been available to him beginning in 1872. You then moved on to the Dutch paintings that were acquired in the Marquand Bequests of 1889 and 1890, which included the first original paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer in the collection (Quodbach, figs. 7, 8). By the time that Marquand donated those and other masterpieces to the Metropolitan Museum, Melville would have collected nearly all the Dutch and Flemish prints cataloged in this chapter. At that time, he was also in the process of assembling Timoleon, his last volume of published poetry, which included “The Bench of Boors,” directly inspired by Teniers  (NN PP 278). And he was also  still nursing the unpublished manuscript of “At the Hostelry,” his poetic debate on the subject of the pictorial picturesque among Old Master painters whose the Dutch and Flemish participants included Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Teniers,  Hals, Terburg, Brouwer, Steen, and Van de Velde (NN BBO 149-168). 

Melville’s unending interest in Dutch and Flemish painting is further attested by his acquisition of Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland, a book published in 1891, the year he died. The copies he acquired of Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland and Mollett’s Rembrandt had been published in 1880 and 1882. In structuring the remainder of this chapter I am following the division that is often made between Dutch figure painters and Dutch landscape painters, even though these categories are far from watertight (as examples like Wouvermans and Rembrandt show). Similarly, the distinction between Dutch and Flemish painters is often difficult to sustain, given the common pictorial conventions and cultural assumptions that painters of either background shared. All the painters in this chapter would have helped Melville make his own judgments about this statement by Sir Joshua Reynolds that Melville marked in his own copy of The Figure Painters of Holland: “painters should go to the Dutch School to learn the art of painting, as they would go to a Grammar School to learn languages” (Gower 2; Cowen 5: 247). 

A painting by one figure painter of Holland not currently known to have been in Melville’s print collection would have caught his eye if he saw it on display at the Metropolitan Museum any time between its acquisition in 1884 and its exhibition from May through November 1891. The painting entitled The Philosophers, donated by Jane L. Melville, was listed as artist “Unknown” in the May 1891 Hand-book for visitors (no. 79, p. 11). More information was provided in the Museum’s 1905 Catalogue, where the artist was identified as Jacob Jordaens and the gift by Jane Melville dated 1884. At least two versions of this subject have been attributed to Jordaens, whose two philosophers have been consistently identified as Heraclitus and Democritus. In June 1980, the copy owned by the New York Met was deaccessioned in a sale at Christies, New York (fig. 1). This painting corresponds closely to the description of the 1884 gift from Jane Melville in the 1905 catalog: “Two men, heroic in size, three-quarters in length, stand behind a large globe; the one on the left of the spectator has his right hand extended as if in argument, the left  being on the shoulder of his companion forward with this right elbow on the globe and his hand to his cheek” (1905 Catalogue, no. 43).