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Rembrandt in the Private Gallery of Samuel Rogers

Melville did have access to one painted self-portrait by Rembrandt during his visit to London in 1849. That self-portrait was one of three original paintings by Rembrandt in the private gallery of Samuel Rogers that Melville visited on December 20 and again on December 23. The catalog of Rogers’s collection in the 1844 edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art listed this painting as “Portrait of Himself when and old man, with a velvet cap on” (no. 10, Appendix IX). Anna Jameson in her 1844 catalog of the collection was a bit more expansive: “Portrait of Rembrandt—when about sixty, in a brown cloak, bordered with fur, and a velvet cap on his head; we wears a gold chain and medal. Executed in a full, sketchy, and most masterly style (no. 48, p. 406). Gustav Waagen on his visit to Rogers’s gallery noted that Rembrandt had painted himself, "at an advanced age, with very dark background and shadows and, for him, in very cool lights.” Rembrandt did this in “his very broadest manner, which borders on sketchiness” (1: 80). In May 1856, six months after the death of Rogers, the Catalog for the estate sale conducted by Christie’s of London described the painting in this way: “Portrait of the artist, in a crimson dress, and brown cloak edged with fur; he wears a jewel suspended from a gold chain, and a black cap. This noble work, of the very highest quality, is from the Collection of the Earl of Carrysfort” (no. 719, p. 74). 

Several of the finest paintings from Rogers’s estate sale, as we have seen, were acquired by London’s National Gallery, where they have been relatively easy to trace. Others passed into private collections in England and abroad where they have been very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to trace. That was the fate of the self-portrait from Rogers’s collection until it surfaced in 1942 at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum as Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait in fur coat with beret and golden chain (fig. 4). That museum traces its provenance back through Berlin, The Hague, and Paris to the Samuel Rogers sale in London in 1856 and that of Lord Carrysfort in 1828. Its website dates the painting to 1655, when Rembrandt was about 50, though some authorities think it may be later. If Melville was trying to trace any reference to the portrait he had seen in Rogers’s collection in 1849 in his copy of the 1880 edition of Mollett’s Rembrandt, the closest may have been the passage describing a self-portrait from 1658 which shows the artist “with a velvet cap covering his white locks; the expression of the face, especially the dark eyes, is full of vigor” (72). For more detail on the current condition and status of the painting, see the commentary and analysis in A Corpus of Rembrandt Painting (IV 11, pp. 440-46). 

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Figure 4. Rembrandt van Rijn. Self-Portrait in fur coat with beret and golden chain, oil on oak, c. 1655. From the sale of the Collection of Samuel Rogers in 1856. Acquired by the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1942. 


Rembrandt’s pose in this self-portrait is as proud as it had been the in 1639 etching or the 1640 oil painting, but the expression on his face conveys the ravages of time and circumstances in the intervening decade and a half. Not only had he lost his beloved wife Saskia in 1642; by 1656 he had been officially declared bankrupt, by the end of 1657 “all his worldly goods had been seized and carried away,” and in 1658 his “great collection of prints and paintings by Italian, French, German, Dutch, and Spanish masters” had been sold at auction (Mollett 68-69). In spite of these misfortunes, Mollett disputes the widely held belief that Rembrandt in his later years was “a misanthrope crushed by evil fortune.” Instead, his productivity as an artist, especially as seen through his late self-portraits, show that “his energy fully supported him in the disaster of 1656.” Rembrandt “produced his marvels of art with unabated industry; his house is comfortable, he loves and cultivates his art, and his last portrait shows him with a laugh of satisfaction on his lips. His old age was cheered by a company of friends and admirers” (68-69, 76-77). 


When Melville saw the above self-portrait by the aging Rembrandt in the Rogers collection in December 1849, he was thirty years old, rising to the peak of young career as a novelist, having just written his fifth novel in five years. By the time Melville acquired his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters in December 1871, he had become more obscure artistically than Rembrandt in 1655. His career as a novelist had ended with The Confidence Man in 1857 and Battle-Pieces, his book of Civil War poetry, had not sold well. Melville was now supporting his family as an inspector at the New York Custom house. Malcolm, the son who was born in 1849, had taken his own life in the family home in 1867. Even so, Melville's gaze toward the viewer in the portrait painted by J. O. Eaton in 1870 (fig. 5) is as steady as that of Rembrandt in the self-portrait of 1655.

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Figure 5. J. O. Eaton. Herman Melville, oil on canvas, 1870. Houghton Library, Harvard University 


The Eaton portrait had been commissioned by Melville’s brother-in-law John Hoadley as a gift to Herman’s mother. Melville’s steadfast face emerges from a dark background much as do those of Rubens and Rembrandt in self-portraits from the seventeenth century. This image of Melville captures the inner spirit of the fifty-one-year-old former novelist who will work as a full-time custom inspector for the next fifteen years, collecting books, writing poetry, and collecting prints in his spare time. While doing so, he became the man whose fusion of mind and vision is the subject of this website.


Of the three paintings by Rembrandt in Rogers’s gallery during Melville’s extended solo visit with the collector on December 20, the above Self-Portrait in the painter’s older age is likely to have drawn considerable attention (especially since Melville had spent a whole hour looking at Rembrandt’s “Jew” and two other paintings at the National Gallery three days earlier) (NN J 42, 44). But the other two Rembrandt paintings in Rogers’s collection were certainly of potential interest.


One was an unusual subject in Rembrandt’s oeuvre. The catalog of Rogers’s collection in the 1844 volume of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art lists it as “Allegorical Sketch: Emancipation of the United Provinces from Spain and Austria” (no. 12 in Appendix IX). Jameson in her 1844 catalog of the collection found the allegory difficult to interpret visually, but she was struck by one prominent symbol: “a lion chained to a tree, on which are inscribed the words ‘Solo Deo gloria’” (no. 47, p. 406). Waagen in his 1854 commentary on Rogers’s collection, found this “rather obscure allegory,” painted in “brown chiaroscuro,” to be an entirely new kind of subject for Rembrandt. After noting “numerous horsemen” and the “lion chained at the foot of a rock, on which the tree of liberty is growing,” Waagen declared this to be a “rich composition” in which “the whole is executed with consummate skill, and the general effect is striking” (1: 79-80). The 1856 sale catalog of Rogers’s collection borrows its commentary from both Jameson and Waagen, adding that the painting had previously belonged to Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West (no. 605, p. 55). It was hard for me to imagine the content and style of this painting before I found it on the website of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (fig. 6). 

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Figure 6. Rembrandt. The Concord of the State, oil on oak, ca. 1636-1641. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.  


On the Rotterdam website, this allegory is called De eendracht van het land in Dutch (The Concord of the State in English). It is dated ca. 1636-1641 and traced to a 1656 inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions. The painting was briefly in the collection of King George III of England before being acquired by Joshua Reynolds in 1768, Benjamin West in 1795, and Samuel Rogers in 1827. After being sold at Rogers’s estate sale 1856, it was acquired by the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in 1865. The harmonies in gold and brown are visually delicious even before one tries to decipher what the chained lion, the bright slope to which it is attached, the precarious tree, and the mass of mounted horsemen in seeming confusion might mean. The painting that was known as The Emancipation of the United Provinces when it was sold in London in 1856 was confusing even to Dutch curators and connoisseurs for more than a century after it arrived in Rotterdam in 1865.  


In volume 3 of the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings published 1985, the team of top Dutch and international scholars from the Rembrandt Research Project were still unable to determine the date of the painting, its actual subject, or the commission or occasion that led to its creation. Their exhaustive examination of the paint surface (visually during a restoration as well as through x-ray analysis), enriched by their extensive knowledge of Dutch provincial history (especially during the Eighty Years War between Spain and The Netherlands that finally ended in 1648), did enable them to identify many of the specific details in the painting (the shield of Amsterdam in the light to the right of the lion, the possible allegorical meanings of the lion, the horsemen, the tree, and the empty throne in the upper right corner), but they were still unable to determine whether the concord being sought was among the separate provinces within the nascent Netherlandish state or with their common enemy the Spanish. That was one of several central questions they were unable to resolve in their fifteen-page, double-column analysis in volume 3 of the Corpus (A 135, pp. 341-356). 


Twenty-five years of subsequent scholarship had enabled the editors to resolve some of those questions by the time they published “a new interpretation” of The Concord of the State in volume 5 of the Corpus in 2010. Their general supposition that this oil sketch had been designed for a political print during the Dutch-Spanish War had been sharpened by an essay establishing that “the many symbols and personifications in it show a strong affinity with those of the political prints and pamphlets” whose “iconographical programme” could only have been supplied by “a member of the Orangist party.” In this context, Rembrandt’s “never-to-be realized print” would have been “a warning to the Dutch to unite at that stage of the war” when “the Amsterdam regents . . . for reasons of commerce, wanted to settle the conflict prematurely.” Given that “dozens of obligatory symbols and personifications had to be worked into the image in an intelligible way,” the editors now find that “the compositional unity and brio with which Rembrandt has unified so many elements in his invention, are all the more impressive.” They surmise that “the intended print was probably never executed because the Amsterdamers eventually agreed to fall in with the strategy of the seven provinces under the leadership of Frederik Hendrik” (Corpus, V: 204-05). 


Based on this new interpretation, the editors of the Corpus date the painting c. 1637. They are more amazed than before by Rembrandt’s “mixture of monumentality and vitality, unity and complexity. In 2010, after “surveying Rembrandt’s entre oeuvre,” in a sentence that would have warmed Samuel Rogers’s heart, they declare that The Concord of the State is “one of his absolute masterpieces, a work in which he demonstrated a complete control over all means that he employs” (205). 


As a collector, Samuel Rogers was highly admired not only for the surpassing quality of the paintings he had acquired by individual artists but for the way many of those acquisitions resonated with those of other artists in his collection. Knowing now the occasion for which Rembrandt painted The Concord of the State in Amsterdam c. 1637 increases the resonance of The Horrors of War that Rubens had painted near Antwerp in 1637-38 (CAT 198, fig. 2).


The third Rembrandt painting in the Rogers collection is also of interest but it is currently untraced and I have not yet found an image. The catalog of the collection in the 1844 edition of Criticisms of Art had described it simply as A Forest Scene: Sunset (no. 11, appendix IX). Anna Jameson in the same year described it as “A Landscape—some trees, and a bit of foreground.” Recalling Hazlitt’s observation that Rembrandt’s landscapes seem to have been “dug out of nature,” she relates that phrase to this painting, with its “earthy, ponderous sublimity of effect, created out of the most simple elements” (no. 49, pp. 406-07). Waagen mentions a few specific elements that may help some day in finding this painting: “a few trees upon a hill in the foreground, with a horseman and a pedestrian; in the background, a plain with a bright horizon.” He adds that “this picture is clearer in the shadows than other landscapes by Rembrandt, and therefore more harmonious in the powerful effect” (1:80). After making its own variation on the details singled out by Waagen (“a forest scene, with horsemen and a beggar on a road, beneath a bank covered with trees, through the stems of which are seen a flat open distance”), the 1856 sale catalog added that “this masterly work, of the highest quality, was the property of President West, and was a favorite study of Sir J. Reynolds” (no. 617, p. 57).  

This painting, measuring 15 ½ x 14 inches, was one of thirty artworks that the Victorian collector and philanthropist Angela Burdett Coutts purchased at the sale of Rogers’s collection in 1856, but it has been untraced since her death fifty years later (see Lewis, Appendix III). We have already seen some of her 1856 purchases that did eventually make their way into public collections. In 1932 Raphael’s Agony in the Garden, previously known as Christ in the Garden, arrived at the New York Metropolitan Museum (CAT 108, fig. 5). In 2007 Ludovico Carracci’s  Madonna and Child with Saints was reunited with the Raphael at the New York Metropolitan (CAT 111, fig. 7). But Rembrandt’s Forest Scene, like Veronese’s sketch for Mary Magdalene Anointing the Saviour’s Feet (CAT 110, fig. 3), has been untraced since the death of Burdett Coutts in 1906 (Lewis, pp. 77-78).

We can only hope that Rembrandt’s Forest Scene: Sunset will someday be discovered and enter a public collection. Until then, we do have the above descriptions by Hazlitt, Jameson, Waagen, and the 1856 sale catalog. And we can imagine Samuel Rogers in December 1849 showing a young American novelist with a Dutch heritage resonances in subject and style between the Evening Landscape with Timber Wagon that Rubens was painting near Antwerp in the 1830s (fig. 7 below), and the Forest Scene: Sunset that Rembrandt was painting near Amsterdam at about the same time. Each of these paintings, like Rembradnt's etchings of the Cottage with White Pailings and The Three Trees in the books he collected, would have helped Melville imagine the landscape from which his ancestor Harmen Harmense van Gansevoort had emigrated in the late 1650s.

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Figure 7. Peter Paul Rubens. Evening Landscape with Timber Wagon, oil on canvas, c. 1630-1640. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, The Netherlands. From the Samuel Rogers collection, where it was known as The Waggon Landscape.

 


Rogers was in the habit of bringing out examples from his exceptional collection of engravings to supplement the experience of paintings by certain artists. Jameson in her 1844 essay suggested that a visit to the collection of Samuel Rogers was an unparalleled opportunity "to educate the eye and mind of one not deficient in sensibility but whose taste is yet to be formed" (386). His 1856 sale catalog listed one group of eight different etchings by Rembrandt; these included “fine” impressions of The Three Trees, The Circumcision, and The Descent from the Cross and a “very fine” impression of  Ephraim Bonus (nos. 1564-1571, p. 120). In his copy of the 1882 edition of Mollett’s Rembrandt, Melville had a very up-to-date “Chronological List of Rembrandt’s Etchings” listing some 400 titles from 1628-1661 (pp. 99-110). One etching certain to have interested Melville simply from scanning through the list was Abraham sending away Hagar and Ishmael (Figure 8), etched by Rembrandt in 1637, about the same time Rembrandt was painting The Concord of the State.  

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Figure 8. Rembrandt van Rijn. Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael, etching with drypoint, 1637. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 


Mollett’s up-to-date 1882 “Chronological List” indicated that one copy of this 1637 etching had been sold in Paris for 800 francs in 1877 (p. 104). In 1897 a copy of Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1906 J. Pierpont Morgan acquired from George W. Vanderbilt the copy that is now at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. One wonders if Melville managed to see a copy or a reproduction of this work any time between his visits to Rogers’s private gallery in December 1849 and his death in September 1891. If so, one would love to know what he would have thought of it. I expect his response would have resonated with the way the Frick Collection described the copy from the Morgan Library and Museum it had borrowed for an exhibition on Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels in 2017.


One sentence establishes that “In Genesis 21, in accordance with Sarah’s wishes and the Lord’s command, Abraham reluctantly banishes his firstborn, Ishmael, and the boy’s mother, the slave Hagar.” The next sentence notes that “Rembrandt depicts this scene as a sorrowful farewell witnessed with pleasure by Sarah and Isaac” (Sarah looks out from the window, Isaac from inside the doorway). At the center of the etching, “Abraham stands on the threshold of his home, his outstretched arms conveying his conflicted feelings and his helplessness in the face of God’s will” (“Abraham Casting Out”). Abraham’s evident sympathy for the two castaways, and the stark contrast between the glee of Sarah and her son in contrast with the sorrow of Hagar and hers, suggests that Rembrandt in 1637, like Melville in the first sentence he published after returning from England in 1850, might be saying “Call me Ishmael.”