Rembrandt van Rijn
Melville was very attentive to Rembrandt during his visits to the picture galleries of England in 1849. At Hampton Court, he took note of “Rembrandt’s Jew.” At the National Gallery, he “spent an hour looking at ‘Rembrandt’s Jew’” and two other paintings. The “superb paintings” he saw in the private collection of Samuel Rogers included three Rembrandts: a self-portrait, a forest scene, and an allegorical sketch (NN J 16, 42, 44, 363). The “Rembrandt’s Jew” he examined so closely at the National Gallery is now known as A Bearded Man in a Cap (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Rembrandt. A Bearded Man in a Cap, oil on canvas, late 1650s. National Gallery, London.
During his short visit to Amsterdam in April 1857, Melville took note of two Rembrandts during his visit to the “Picture Gallery” known as the Trippenhuis (now part of the Rijksmuseum): “The Syndics . . . & The Night Watch (shadow)” (NN J 127, 523). The Night Watch continues to be a major attraction at the Rijksmusem, but it not as dark and shadowy as when Melville saw it; restoration has shown it to be a daytime scene (fig. 2):
Figure 2. Rembrandt. The Night Watch, oil on canvas, 1642. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Melville’s next recorded reference to Rembrandt comes in the manuscript of “At the Hostelry,” where Adrien Brouwer tries to get a rise out of Rembrandt by saying, “You sooty stroke! / ‘Tis you, old sweep, believe in smoke.” Yet Rembrandt, “reserved in self-control, / Jostled by that irreverent droll, / Seemed not to hear, nor silence broke,” showing a restraint similar to that of Claude in response to provocations by Swanevelt earlier in the poem (NN BBO 157, 154).
In addition to these direct responses to Rembrandt in Melville’s own travels and writings are the more indirect responses in his own reading and thinking. Melville would have read extensively about the artist not only in his book on Rembrandt by John Mollett (Sealts no. 363) and in the essay on Rembrandt in The Works of Eminent Masters (1: 385-98) but also in the extensive discussion of Rembrandt in the art criticism he owned by such writers as Hazlitt and Ruskin, some of which he marked, as we will see. Rembrandt was as gifted in etching as he was in painting, causing Georges Duplessis to declare in the copy of The Wonders of Engraving that Melville acquired in 1875 (Sealts no. 195) that “Rembrandt founded the Dutch school properly so called, and we may add that he completely represents it. He created every variety of subject, and in every style proved himself to be an inimitable artist. . . . [H]is magic needle obtained results from etching of which it was not deemed capable." Rembrandt's depiction of domestic scenes "gives to these familiar subjects a spirit, a power, a touch of nature, which are irresistibly interesting and attractive. He surpasses every one in his noble and life-like portraits. Rembrandt was also a master of landscape design. Holland has many great landscape painters but none represented this artificial country with so much truth as Rembrandt” (95-96).
Beyond all the individual paintings Melville saw, and passages he read, about Rembrandt was the overall image of the artist and man that evolved over the years from all he had seen, read, felt, and thought, an overall gestalt that Lewis Mumford, in his 1929 biography of Melville, was the first to see as having deep personal meaning. With Rembrandt, Mumford posits, Melville “was close to his own kind. In Holland, he had first noticed Rembrandt’s shadows. Rembrandt’s depth, his torment, and the warm blood beneath it all—that was Melville’s too” (336). Mumford’s intuition about a personal identification with Rembrandt is supported by a passage that Melville marked (and underscored) in the copy of Balzac’s Correspondence that his wife Elizabeth gave him for his seventieth birthday in 1889. Melville marked Balzac’s assertion that any person desiring to achieve a rich synthesis in any of the arts “would be better . . . to struggle for two years with light and shade in a corner, like Rembrandt, who never left his own house, than to run about America, and to come back cruelly disenchanted, as he surely would be, in his political ideas” (Leyda, Log, 2: 815; Cowen, 2:18; underlines Melville’s).
Mumford mentions having seen two Rembrandt prints from Melville’s collection: “a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and The Woman Taken in Adultery” (336). He had presumably been shown these prints by Melville’s granddaughter Eleanor Melville Metcalf, a major source for his biography. Although these two prints are currently unlocated, we are including them in this catalog in the hope that they will one day surface. As placeholders, we are including the image of one Rembrandt self-portrait that appeared in two books that Melville owned (CAT 201) and one print of The Woman taken in Adultery that would have been available to Melville as a collector (CAT 200). These two placeholders supplement the one print after Rembrandt in Melville’s collection that does survive, G. Levy’s “Noli me Tangere,” now at the Berkshire Athenaeum (CAT 199).