Teniers, van Tilborgh, and van Ostade

In the wake of the highly allusive and ambitious works that Rubens and Rembrandt painted in Antwerp and Amsterdam, respectively, we now turn to animated, secular peasant life in Flemish and Dutch locales painted by David Teniers the Younger, Gillis van Tilborgh the Younger, and Adrian van Ostade. An essay on Teniers’ Flemish Fair in Melville’s 1854 copy of Works of the Eminent Masters relates an episode in which Rubens arrived unannounced in the Antwerp studio in which young Teniers (“not yet fifteen”) was painting, took the brush from his hand, and gave him a painterly demonstration that the fledgling artist never forgot (1: 256). The long biographical essay on Adrian van Ostade in the same volume of Works emphasizes the degree to which Rembrandt, only four years older than young Adrian, indelibly shaped the work of that young painter, even though he may never have given him an actual lesson. That essay on van Ostade, one of the most heavily marked in Melville’s personal copy of Works, declares that “Adrien van Ostade did in protestant Holland what Teniers had done in catholic Flanders,” each bringing the elevated style of his most revered predecessor down into the celebration of common everyday life (1: 211).  Such parallel achievements, and several others, are visible in Melville’s three prints after Teniers, van Tilborgh, and van Ostade. 

The images and information available to Melville about all three painters in the copy of  Works he acquired in 1871 were supplemented by the text, illustrations, and documentation in the copy he acquired of Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland after its publication in 1880. Melville’s exposure to paintings by Teniers, van Tilborgh, and van Ostade in the galleries of London, Paris, and Cologne in 1849, supplemented by the paintings by these artists he saw in the galleries of Italy and the Netherlands in 1857, were further supplemented by the rich variety of paintings by these and other of Dutch and Flemish artists exhibited at Metropolitan Museum of Art after Melville retired from the Custom House in 1885. The books he acquired, the paintings he saw, and the prints he collected by these three artists contributed greatly to the animation and expertise with which Melville represented Dutch and Flemish Old Master painters in “At the Hostelry,” the ambitious poetic debate about the painterly picturesque he was still actively revising at the time of his death in 1891.  

Before we look at the prints after Teniers, van Tilborgh and van Ostade that Melville collected, followed by those he collected after 19 additional Dutch and Flemish painters, we will examine the layout of the exhibition spaces on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum in which paintings by those Dutch and Flemish painters, as well as those we have already discussed by Rembrandt, Rubens, and a variety of French painters whose prints Melville collected, were exhibited between 1886 and 1891.