John Burnet after Rembrandt. The Woman taken in Adultery

Rembrandt painted Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery in 1644, eight years after Christ and St. Mary Magdalen at the Tomb. This painting was inspired by an earlier passage in the Gospel of John, the one in which the Pharisees bring a “woman who had been caught in the act of adultery” to the Temple and ask if she should be stoned according to the law of Moses. Jesus, in response, “stood up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her’” (John 7:53-8:11). Rembrandt offers a more distant perspective of this scene than he had in the one of Christ and the Magdalen in the garden, but the chiaroscuro with which he highlights the standing Christ and the kneeling woman against the oppressive darkness of the temple imbues this well-known biblical story with his own emotional force and psychological empathy (fig. 1). 

Rembrandt’s The Woman taken in Adultery had been part of the collection of John Angerstein when John Burnet’s etching of the painting was published in London on March 20, 1823 (see image at the head of this entry). By the time William Hazlitt published “Mr. Angerstein’s Collection” as the lead essay in Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries of England in 1824, Mr. Angerstein had died and his collection had become the foundation of the National Gallery in London. The paintings Hazlitt had seen when they were still in Angerstein’s private collection included masterpieces by Claude Lorrain, Annibale Carracci, Anthony van Dyck, Aelbert Cuyp, Raphael, Poussin, Rubens, and Rembrandt. Hazlitt wrote that a collection such as this is “the mind’s true home. The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never dies.” Melville marked that passage in the copy of Hazlitt’s Criticisms of Art he acquired in 1870 (2-3; Sealts no. 263a). Melville also attended closely to Hazlitt’s impassioned, yet discriminating, commentary on Rembrandt’s The Woman taken in Adultery. 

Melville placed his first check mark next to Hazlitt’s assertion that Rembrandt in this painting is “prodigious in colouring, in light and shade, in pencilling, in solemn effect.” Hazlitt does concede that this painting is stronger in “outward show” than the “inward”; even so, “it is worth any money.” Hazlitt admires the “seriousness and dignity” of the Christ figure, but his highest praise is for Rembrandt’s brilliant use of light and color,” which “place this picture in the first rank of Rembrandt’s wonderful performances.” Melville added his own underline to Hazlitt’s examples of these effects:

The marble pavement, of which the light is even dazzling; the figures of the Rabbis to the right,  radiant with crimson, green, and azure; [and] the background, which seems some rich oil-colour smeared over a ground of gold, and where the eye staggers from one abyss of obscurity to another.  

In addition to underline, Melville added three marginal check marks in the right margin of Hazlitt’s commentary (14-15; for Melville’s underlines and marks near the top of page 15, see MMO 263a). 

Although Melville made the above marks and underlines in the essay on “Mr. Angerstein’s Collection” in the 1843 edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art that he acquired in 1870, he may well have been reading that essay before, during, or after his first visit to London, and its National Gallery, in 1849. Evert Duyckinck, young Melville’s mentor in literary and visual art in New York City in the late 1840s, had edited the first American, multi-volume edition of Hazlitt’s essays in 1845-46. Duyckinck’s personal library held nearly every book Hazlitt had ever published, including the 1824 edition of Sketches of the Principal Picture--Galleries in England and the 1843 edition of Criticisms on Art whose reprint of each of the Sketches was accompanied by an appendix listing all the works in each of the galleries. When Duyckinck had crossed the Atlantic to see the picture galleries of England for first time in 1839, he used his personal copy of Hazlitt’s Sketches as his guide, writing in his unpublished journal that “if I were an artist, I do not think I could say anything of pictures after Hazlitt; I never had more delight in reading anything than in his sketch of the Dulwich Gallery which I carried in my pocket in the original edition of the London Magazine.” At Hampton Court, too, Duyckinck “walked with Hazlitt as my guide—it is quite enough to have seen and I hope felt the beauties he has pointed out.” Ten years later, when Melville sailed to London and its picture galleries for the first time, he took four guidebooks from Duyckinck’s library with him, one of which was almost certainly one of Duyckinck’s two copies of Hazlitt’s Sketches (Wallace, Melville and Turner, 126-27, 252). 

After sailing from New York on October 11, 1849, Melville arrived in London on November 6. His primary goal was to find a publisher for the manuscript of White-Jacket, his fifth novel, hoping to secure an advance that would enable him to extend his travel to Rome and other Italian cities after crossing the English Channel to visit galleries in France and Germany. Melville did not secure an advance for White-Jacket until December 15, too late to make arrangements for travel to Rome, but by November 22 he had already visited the first four of Hazlitt’s principal galleries of London: the National Gallery (twice), Hampton Court, Dulwich Gallery, and Windsor Castle, all of which had paintings by Rembrandt. After returning from Paris and Cologne on December 13, Melville made his third visit to the National Gallery on December 17, where he “spent an hour looking at Rembrandt’s Jew & the Saints of Taddeo Gaddi & Guido’s Murder of the Innocents.” The “superb paintings” he saw in the private collection of Samuel Rogers on December 20 and again on December 23 included three Rembrandts: a self-portrait, a forest scene, and an allegorical sketch (NN J 14, 16, 42, 44, 46, 363). So his three opportunities to see The Woman taken in Adultery at the National Gallery had been supplemented by exposure to a great many other paintings by Rembrandt. 

John Burnet’s 1823 etching of The Woman taken in Adultery from the Angerstein Collection at the head of this entry is the most likely candidate we have found for the print from Melville’s collection that Lewis Mumford saw in the 1920s but is currently untraced (Mumford, 336). Melville was already aware of Burnet before he saw Rembrandt’s painting at the National Gallery in November and December 1849 because he had access to the 1837 edition of Burnet’s four-part Treatise on Painting in March and April of 1849 when he was in Boston for the birth of his son Malcolm (Sealts no. 98). Burnet’s book began with “An Essay on the Education of the Eye” followed by “Practical Hints on Composition,” on “Light and Shade,” and on “Colour.” Burnet illustrated his argument with more an a hundred of his own engravings, most of them after works by Venetian, Italian, and Dutch artists; works by Rembrandt were discussed and illustrated throughout the entire Treatise (Wallace, Melville and Turner, 178-81). Burnet’s pedagogical illustrations of the theoretical elements of the art of painting, combined with the journalistic gusto of Hazlitt’s Sketches essays, gave young Melville the perfect preparation for his extended introduction to the principal picture galleries of London in November and December 1849.  

John Burnet’s etching of The Woman taken in Adultery could not reproduce any of the “radiant” colors (“crimson, green, and azure”) that Melville was to underline in Hazlitt’s commentary on the painting itself. But Burnet’s etching does achieve its own equivalence for the subtle effects in the background of the painting, where “the eye staggers on from one abyss of obscurity to another.” The feeling in the Burnet engraving is quite similar to the one Melville evokes in the “Prelusive” canto of Clarel about the “Interiors measurelessly strange” in “Piranesi’s rarer prints,” whose “shadowed galleries . . . impend / Over cloisters, cloisters without end” (2.35.1-2, 8-9). Burnet in his Treatise derives many of his principles, and examples, of chiaroscuro from the art of Rembrandt. He also compares Rembrandt’s mastery of “light and shade” with that of Shakespeare, each expressing “the chiaroscuro of nature passing through a mind capable of the finest impressions” (45). In 1849, Burnet published Rembrandt and his Works, a biography of the artist featuring a Critical Examination into his Principles and Practice of Design, Light, Shade and Colour and Illustrated by Examples from the Etchings of Rembrandt. The book was published in London by David Bogue, who had been “all ears” when Melville met with him on November 22, 1849, in an unsuccessful effort to interest him in publishing White-Jacket (NN J 25).