C. Gaucher after G. van Tilborgh. L'Après-Dinée Flamande

Gillis van Tilborgh the Younger (c. 1625 – c. 1678) studied with David Teniers the Younger after the latter moved from Amsterdam to Brussels. This image shows the direct influence of the kind of tavern scenes that Teniers painted in the 1640s and 1650s (see CAT 202, figures 5 and 6; Wheelock, pp. 245-48). In this tavern scene by van Tilborgh (often spelled Tilborch) none of the boors are sleeping. The three onlookers are closely watching the three card-players, who are closely watching each other. The expressions on the face of the young player on the left and the player whose shaded profile we see from behind are delicately rendered; the player in the middle bears his teeth in dismay or surprise. “Little is known about Van Tilborgh’s early career,” Arthur Wheelock writes in 2005, “but it is evident . . . that he preferred to paint half-length, small-scale genre scenes, which he rendered with great delicacy of touch. He had little interest in depicting rogues or scoundrels, and even less for distinguished gentlemen and elegant women. He preferred humble individuals, whom he neither idealized nor caricatured, his primary interest being to record their basic humanity” (255). 

Van Tilborgh’s L'Après-Dinée Flamande (Flemish Evening) was published in Paris in 1766, when its engraver, Charles-Étienne Gaucher (1741-1804) was twenty-five years old.  Gaucher dedicated the engraving to his mentor, Pierre-François Basan, who was then Engraver to the Cabinet of the King (no. 7 in Pognon and Bruand, 9: 462). Along with the engraving of Teniers’ Le Ballet Rustique Flamand by Winckler at about the same time (CAT 202, c. 1760), this print shows a keen interest in seventeenth-century Flemish genre scenes by mid-eighteenth-century Parisians. Among French engravers, Goucher is admired for his “extremely meticulous execution” (Michel 178). In its intimate depiction of mentally active men gathered closely around a table, this print resembles Melville’s copy of Meissonier’s Lecture chez Diderot (CAT 173). In its subject matter, this engraving resembles the card-playing scene in Caravaggio’s The Cheating Gamblers, a painting Melville saw at the Sciarra Gallery in Rome, prompting his journal entry about “Honesty and Knavery—the self-possession and confidence of knavery—the irresolution and perplexity of honesty” (NN J 109, 478). 

Van Tilborgh joined the Brussels Guild of Saint Luke in 1654 and became dean of the Guild in 1663. In 1666 he succeeded Teniers the keeper of paintings at Tervuren Castle, residence of governor of the Hapsburg Netherlands. He also followed Teniers in the variety of genres he painted, not only tavern scenes and guardroom scenes, but in individual and group portraits. The painting by van Tilborgh that the New York Metropolitan Museum acquired as part of its Original Purchase in 1871 is one of those formal group portraits in which Teniers and van Tilborgh each specialized as they moved away from early tavern scenes and rustic subjects toward the depiction of middle-class and upper-class subjects (fig. 1). 

This large oil painting (45 ½ x 63 ¼ inches) was known as The Visit of a Landlord to his Tenant when it arrived at the Museum in 1871. In 1984 Walter Liedtke confirmed it as A Wedding Scene by identifying the familial and social status of all the figures sitting and standing at, behind, and to the sides of the table at the center (268-70). Katharine Baetjer in 2004 indicated that this painting was then being used more for educational purposes than for public display at the Museum (183 and Appendix 1, no. 11, p. 200). It certainly offers a telling contrast to the rustic conviviality of Teniers’s Peasants Dancing and Feasting at the Metropolitan Museum and Le Ballet Rustique Flamand in Melville’s print collection. 

Another painting in which van Tilborgh followed Teniers is his Self-Portrait in the Studio (figure 2). 

The pose in this charming, engaging oil painting resembles that of a self-portrait by Teniers, who also looks directly at the viewer with his hand up next to whatever image he is painting. The intimacy of the pose, and the brightness of the light on the face against the softer browns and ochres, intensify the feeling of youthful precociousness. Van Tilborch was only about twenty years old when he painted this image on a panel measuring only 4 ¼ x 3 ½ inches. This self-portrait was was once attributed to Adriaen van Ostade, who was also strongly influenced by Teniers, but the drawing pinned to the wall behind the young painter appears in a later painting by van Tilborgh himself (Wheelock 253-55).  

This evocative self-portrait was acquired by the National Gallery in Washington in 2003. It makes a perfect transition to our next catalog entry, Melville’s print after a self-portrait of Adriaen van Ostade in his studio.