Rembrandt in Melville’s Book Collection

The copy of The Wonders of Engraving by George Duplessis that Melville acquired 1875 (Sealts no. 195) had fewer pages devoted to Rembrandt (6) and fewer illustrations of his artwork (2) than did The Works of Eminent Masters. But Duplessis did provide a cogent, authoritative account of Rembrandt’s professional life (which, “devoted to study, furnishes small material for biography”), his insolvency (which “compelled him to sell his home, his furniture, his very studio!”), and his later years (when, as was to be the case with Melville, he “sank more and more into obscurity”). Duplessis is primarily concerned with how Rembrandt “founded the Dutch school” of engraving by “creating every variety of subject, and in every way proved himself to be an inimitable artist.” In high-art subjects, domestic scenes, portraits, and landscapes he “obtained with the magic needle results from etching of which it was not deemed capable” (93-99). Melville as a print collector in the mid-1870s would have benefitted from the separate chapters in which Duplessis traced the evolution of engraving in the Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, German, and English schools. Equally valuable would have been the concluding chapter on “Processes” in which Duplessis describes the specific materials and techniques required for wood engraving, copper-plate engraving, etching, line engraving, dry point, mezzotint, aquatint, chalk style, color engraving, heliography, and photography (308-29).  

Duplessis in The Wonders of Engravings illustrates the above techniques as they evolved in the various national schools over three hundred years with reproductions after thirty different artists. Rembrandt is illustrated by two etchings, one of which is the landscape known as Cottage with White Palings (fig. 3). Etched by Rembrandt in 1648, this image would have helped Melville imagine the landscape from which his Dutch ancestor Harmense van Gansevoort emigrated to the future site of Albany, New York, in the late 1650s.  

Melville got even more up-to-date information on the life and art of Rembrandt in the copy he acquired of the biography and critical study of the artist by John William Mollett published in London in 1882 (Sealts no. 363). This was a new edition of Mollett’s Rembrandt, allowing him to take full advantage of the comprehensive biography and catalogue in the second edition of Rembrandt Harmens Van Rijn, Sa Vie Et Ses Œuvres, published by C. Vosmaer in French in The Hague in 1877 (fig. 4). Mollett follows Vosmaer in charting the relationship between Rembrandt’s life and work year by year and decade by decade in etching as well as painting. The narrative biography and one-page Chronology of Rembrandt’s Domestic Life are followed by very extensive Chronological Lists of Rembrandt’s Paintings (85-98) and Etchings (99-110). The List of Paintings includes more than 400 works by date, title, and current owner, with additional information often supplied in italics. The List of Etchings includes more than 400 works by date, title, and its catalog number from Charles Blanc’s comprehensive list of Rembrandt’s etchings published in Paris in 1864 and updated in 1880. Mollett’s book would have been extremely helpful to Melville in reviewing titles, dates, and current locations of Rembrandt’s paintings he had seen in the public and private galleries of London in 1849, in Paris in 1849, and in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1857; in learning more about Rembrandt etchings he had seen or read about in  Burnet’s 1837 Treatise on Painting, the 1854 edition of The Works of Eminent Masters, and Duplessis’s 1871 The Wonders of Engraving; and in learning more about the origins and techniques of the three prints after Rembrandt he is known to have collected himself. 

Another of the etchings that Mollett reproduced in Rembrandt in 1882 (p. 52) had also been reproduced in The Works of Eminent Masters in 1854 (p. 397). The Three Trees (fig. 6) is Rembrandt’s largest etching. It is widely admired for the depth of its landscape in a small space;  the rich mystery of the sky on the left; the minute inclusion of generic Dutch structures, inhabitants, animals, and activity both far and near; and of course the deft etching of the three trees anchoring the image on the right, the light on their trunks showing the strength and direction of the slanting sun. The three trees were richly symbolic for many of Rembrandt’s Dutch contemporaries, some seeing them as standing in for the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, others seeing them as the United Provinces of the Netherlands standing tall and united after having finally overthrown the oppressive rule of occupying Spain.  

For at least two centuries, art historians in The Netherlands and other nations had tried to find the actual view that Rembrandt had captured in this landscape. By the time Melville acquired Mollett’s book the consensus had become what it remains today: that this exact view existed only in Rembrandt’s mind and vision as his etching needle brought together all the generic elements that represent a Dutch landscape. Etched in 1643, The Three Trees, too, would have helped Melville imagine the Dutch landscape his ancestor Hermanse van Gansevoort had emigrated from in the late 1650s. 

Mollett, following Vosmaer’s interpretive method of discussing Rembrandt’s paintings and etchings chronologically in tandem, discusses the 1643 etching of The Three Trees on the same page as the 1644 painting of The Woman taken in Adultery. Although Rembrandt produced “very few etchings” in 1643, The Three Trees is a “gem,” expressing “the master’s profound knowledge of the power of the art which he was the first to bring to perfection, and of which he may also be said to have been the inventer.” By contrast, the painting of The Woman taken in Adultery is “a grave and solemn scene among the columns and arches of a vast temple” (see fig. 1 above). “The composition is wonderfully grand. In the midst of a richly dressed crowd of Pharisees and soldiers, and contrasting with them, a Man sits alone, simply robed and barefooted. It is to him that the wretched woman prostrates herself. Behind are steps and the two pillars—Jachin and Boaz. The crowd is passing up these steps towards an altar, splendid with gold, in front of which sits the high priest.” After staying for more than a century in the family of Rembrandt’s “patron and friend Jan Six,” who had commissioned it, The Woman taken in Adultery traveled to England, where, in Mollett’s 1882 words, “we now have the happiness of seeing it in the National Gallery, in London,” where Melville would have seen it during his three visits in 1849 (Mollett, Rembrandt, 54).