L. Ekeman-Allesson after Adriaen van Ostade. The Painter in his Studio

Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685) was an exact contemporary of David Teniers the Younger. His 1663 oil painting of The Artist in his Studio in one of the iconic pictures of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Van Ostade painted several versions of this subject but this version in the Dresden State Museum is considered to be one of his absolute masterpieces. This painting was reproduced in several nineteenth-century engravings, but the image that Melville owned was quite rare, and was little known even in Stuttgart, the city in which it was presumably made. Melville’s image of The Painter in his Studio is a lithograph by Lorenz Ekeman-Alleson (1791-1828), a native of Sweden who in 1821 was called to Stuttgart as the founding director of its new Institute for Lithography. His lithographic technique was well suited for reproducing the shading as well as the detail of van Ostade’s iconic painting.   

The light and shade in van Ostade’s original painting (fig. 1) calls forth the highest praise in the chapter on this painter in Melville’s copy of Lord Ronald Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland (1880). “In many of van Ostade’s interiors the lights and shadows are as subtly managed as even in those of Rembrandt; look, for instance, at a picture in the old hall in which Van Ostade has shown himself at work before his easel; how the darkness of this cloistered apartment can be felt; only one window admits the light through its narrow panes of glass, to fall brokenly on a hundred chequers on the old stone floor; in the dim distance beneath the winding staircase an apprentice is grinding the artist’s colours. Is not Rembrandt’s influence strongly marked in such a work?” (Gower 24). Melville could answer that question in the affirmative by glancing at the deep chiaroscuro of his print after Rembrandt’s The Woman Taken in Adultery (CAT 200).   

Ekeman-Allesson’s lithograph effectively conveys not only the assistant laboring deep in the background but also the sheets of paper scattered on the floor; the sketch clipped to the easel; the light on the painter’s back, hat, and canvas; the clutter of objects on the low, shadowed table to the right of the painter; the flexible limbs of the mannikin to the right of the stairs; the shadowed head on the floor behind the chair; the bright light on the fish hanging to the right of the high window; and the softly shadowed cloth stretched out across the ceiling. The lithograph also reveals, of course, the notorious sparseness of this studio’s furnishings. The commentary that accompanied a variant of The Painter in his Studio in Payne’s Royal Dresden Gallery in 1845 notes that “the study of Ostade was a large desolate looking room, almost without furniture.” The painter’s “coarse and almost sordid dress, as well as the cheerless look of the atelier, form a curious contrast to the magnificence with which Rubens and Vandyke delighted to surround themselves during the exercise of their art” (“Ostade in his Study,” I: 76).  

Many of the above elements of the 1663 oil painting of The Painter in his Studio that appear in Ekeman-Allesson’s lithograph also appear in the etching of The Painter in the Studio that van Ostade created a few years after the painting (c. 1667; fig. 2). The room, the placement of the painter and the easel in the room, and the light streaming through the window are very much the same, but now there are two assistants rather than one grinding the paint, not in the background but near the foot of the stairs, and the flexible mannikin has ascended onto a platform above the assistants and next to a mandolin hanging on the wall. The brightly lit fish has gone, and so is the shadowed, sculpted head on the floor behind the artist’s chair. Now the left foot, rather than the right one, rests on the base of the easel. Copies of this etching were already making their way to the United States in Melville’s lifetime; the copy pictured here was acquired by the Princeton University Art Museum in 1888. 

The above etching relates to Melville’s collecting activity because it is reproduced in the essay on Adriaen van Ostade in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 (fig. 3 below). This engraving after van Ostade’s original etching is one of nine reproductions in the essay that show the artist’s range of subject; the others include a self-portrait, an untitled image of three boors in a tavern, The Hump-Backed Violinist, The Rustic Household, The Dutch Smoking Room, The Game of Shuffle-Board, The Dance at the Inn, and The Strolling Musicians. The commentator is highly attuned to van Ostade’s exceptional talent in etching, an engraving technique which allowed him to combine “sobriety” with “freedom and vigor.” This is especially evident in The Painter in his Studio, where “the white of the paper . . . performs an important part. Not a line is without purpose, not a hatching which is not there to give expression to features, to arrange a fold of the drapery, or to indicate a movement. The parts of light and shade are neatly cut, and when the half-tints are multiplied, it is entirely exceptional.” At the end of the essay, the author mentions 26 of Ostade’s 50 etchings by name (Works, 1: 212-14, 215-18). 

In 1875, four years after Melville acquired the 1854 edition of The Works of Eminent Masters, he acquired the 1871 edition of The Wonders of Engraving by Georges Duplessis (Sealts no. 185). Duplessis not only updated the appreciation of van Ostade’s etchings in Melville’s copy of Works; he did so with a sophisticated understanding of the history of engraving in the Netherlands and all of Europe. He admires Dutch etchings of humble subjects “because they are true. The smoking rooms and taverns to which we are introduced by Ostade or Brauwer are full of life and animation.” Brauwer left “some etchings of great delicacy and power” before his early death, but Ostade as an engraver “ranks higher . . . on account of the spirit and life of the figures.” He “possessed this gift of vivid representation in a great degree; when he shows us an artist at work in his studio in a tall cap, we distinctly see how the painter’s attention is fixed on his work, how carefully he is covering his canvas” (99-100). 

The copy Melville acquired of Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland, published in 1880, was another valuable resource for information about van Ostade’s life and work. The chapter on van Ostade provided new biographical information and gave considerable attention to the etchings (21-26). Its comprehensive list of Principal Paintings by van Ostade gave Melville much more information than the earlier, more casual list in the essay on the painter in Works. Gower listed 84 paintings in 30 public and private collections ranging from England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, to Spain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Russia. Many entries included not only the date of the painting but the names of those who had created engravings, etchings, or lithographs after that work, including etchings by van Ostade himself. Gower’s list did not extend across the Atlantic to include any painting that had by then reached the United States. But it did give Melville a handy way to remember the names of paintings by van Ostade he would have been able to see during his visits to museums and galleries in England and the Continent in 1849 and 1857. Gower listed four paintings by van Ostade at the Dulwich Gallery in London, one at the National Gallery in London, seven at the Louvre in Paris, one at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, two at the Museum in Rotterdam, and six at public and private galleries in Amsterdam (87-89).