Family Portraits

Adriaen van Ostade does not appear in Melville’s novels, poems, and journals to the extent that Teniers does, but Melville’s extensive markings in the essay on van Ostade in Works show him stockpiling all sorts of information (about Frans Hals, Adrian Brouwer, Rembrandt, Teniers, the difference between Flemish and Dutch taste, etc.) that would serve as background for his treatment of the painterly picturesque in “At the Hostelry.” Melville’s most conspicuous marking in this essay is a big X next to the passage declaring that van Ostade, in the studio of Frans Hals, “formed a friendship with Brouwer, who also was called Adrian, and who had already, without being aware of it, sufficient talent to be made by his master the subject of what is now called an exploitation—a new word to express a very old thing.” Brouwer is a lively presence throughout “At the Holstelry,” whereas Hals has one sprightly exchange with Van Dyck before Brouwer solicits responses from Teniers and Rembrandt (NN BBO 156-57).

Up higher, at the top of the same column of the same page of Works (see figure 5 below), Melville drew a marginal line along the declaration that van Ostade’s young life as a painter began in the studio of Hals, whose “bold, vigorous” Flemish manner contrasted sharply with van Ostade’s own instinctive embodiment of Dutch moderation. Van Ostade was “as moderate in his exterior physiognomy as in his genius. His grave appearance, the benevolence and simplicity of his countenance, declared the purity of his soul and the regularity of his life; the precise arrangement of his pictures, and the precious finish of their execution, speak of the conscience of the artist, his scrupulous care, his patience” (1: 210).

As you can see in the above image, Melville drew a continuous line down the left margin of the long paragraph in the middle of the column on the left. This entire paragraph is devoted to the “celebrated picture” at the Louvre in which van Ostade has “marvellously painted himself” in the company of his wife and “numerous children” (fig. 6).

Young Melville may well have noticed this painting among the “heaps of treasures” he saw when “running the painted gauntlet of the gods” at the Louvre in 1849 (NN J 31; NN P 359). He also may have seen the engraving that Gower mentions in his 1880 entry for The Family of Adriaan van Ostade among the paintings at the Louvre (88). But we do know that Melville did see the entire paragraph devoted to this painting that he marked on page 210 in the copy of Works he acquired in 1871 (see again figure 5 above).

The paragraph that Melville marked about The Family of the Painter declares that “the genius of Holland is wholly here—family feeling, tranquility of mind, interior life, rigid, and simple. And here the method of the painter exactly corresponds to the thought of the picture. Ostade, his wife, and eight children, are here disposed in a large space softly lighted, the furniture of which consists solely of an avenue of columns; the tone of the walls is of a fine gray . . . which serves as a basis to the harmony of the picture. Upon this agreeable tint stand out the white necks and black vestments of all the members of the family. The girls and the boys, the youngest about eight years of age, have the flat features, the rounded nose, the projecting chin, and the sharp eye. They resemble their parents, as become well-born children, and are equally remarkable for their ugliness and that of their costume. All the heads are uncovered, with the exception of that of Van Ostade, the father, who wears his hat” (210).

Van Ostade in his hat sits in the chair whose legs we see in the left foreground of the family portrait, surveying his family with “paternal regard.” Melville continues his marginal marking all the way down through the end of the long paragraph, whose last sentence completes this tribute to “a charming composition, which breathes tranquil emotion, the peaceful felicity of a united family, from the father who holds in his hand that of his wife, to the youngest child, who offers cherries to its little sister!” In addition to drawing a continuous line along the left margin of the paragraph, Melville placed a check mark marking the transition from the “flat faces” of the “well-born children” to the “paternal regard” of the father (210).

Melville’s extended markings along this entire paragraph, sometime after acquiring this copy of Works in 1871, no doubt reflected a keen interest in the subject and style of the painting itself (which, however, was not among the nine engravings which illustrated this essay). One can imagine that these marks might also reflect a personal interest in both the subject and style of such a harmonious family portrait. The 1654 date of the van Ostade family painting was only a few years before Melville’s ancestor Harmen Harmense van Gansevoort left the Netherlands for the site of Albany, New York, where he started the line of the Gansevoort family among whom Herman Melville’s mother Maria was to became a proud member. In 1819 Herman became the third of the six “well-born” children of Maria Gansevoort and Allan Melvill, himself a proud member of a Boston family that had distinguished itself during the Revolutionary War against the British. During Herman’s early years as a child in New York City, his father had considerable success as in importer of dry goods from France, moving the family up Broadway into increasingly prosperous neighborhoods—until the bankruptcy Allan suffered in 1830 caused him to move with his wife and six children upriver to Albany, under the protective wing of the remaining Gansevoort family. Allan’s sudden illness and delirious death in 1832 removed the once proud father from any future family portrait and caused Maria to move her increasingly impoverished family across the river to avoid their staggering debts.

Maria’s son Herman had a chance to father a family of his own when he married Elizabth Shaw from Boston in 1847 after returning from his three-year whaling voyage in 1844 and publishing Typee to great acclaim in 1846. Herman and Elizabeth settled in New York City soon after their marriage; their first son, Malcolm, was born in February 1849 while the proofs of Mardi, Herman’s third novel, were being sent for publication in London. In October 1851, a year after the family had moved into its Arrowhead home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Stanwix, their second son, was born while Moby-Dick, Herman’s sixth novel, was being published in London. Two daughters, Elizabeth and Frances, had arrived in the family by 1856, when Herman, exhausted from a decade of non-stop writing, sailed on the restorative voyage to Europe and the Mediterranean that immersed him, for the first time, in the cultures of the Middle East and the artistry of Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands. After moving from Pittsfield back to New York City in 1863, during the Civil War, Herman established his family in the house on East 26th Street previously owned by his younger brother Allan and published Battle-Pieces, his first book of poetry, in 1866, the year he became an inspector at the New York Custom House. One year later, Malcolm, eighteen years old, removed himself from the Melville family portrait by committing suicide in the family home. In the photo below we see Malcolm with his three younger siblings when he was about twelve years old (fig. 7).

One imagines that Herman was thinking of his own less harmonious, more troubled family history, both as a father and as a son, when he paid such close attention of the description of van Ostade’s own Family Portrait in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that he inscribed to his wife Elizabeth in December 1871 (Sealts no. 564). One year earlier, he had acquired his copy of William Hazlitt’s Criticisms of Art. In the opening paragraph of the essay on “The Marquis of Stafford’s Collection” he drew three marginal lines alongside, and a series of underlines within, the declaration that “there are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate objects--books, pictures, and the face of nature. What is the world but a heap of ruined friendships, but the grave of love?” (MMO 263a).

The parental pain sharpened further for Herman and Elizabeth during the 1870s and 1880s when Stanwix, now their eldest son, left their New York home in the mid-1870s for a happier life in the West which he never found, unable to keep a job, dying alone in San Francsico in 1886 at age 35, after which his parents arranged for his body to be returned to New York City and buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where his father was to join him and Malcolm five years later (for more detail, see our CAT 184). By the time Stanwix died in 1886, his youngest sister Frances, who had married Henry B. Thomas in 1880, had given birth to the Melvilles’ first two granddaughters, Eleanor in 1882 and Frances in 1883, with Katharine and Jeanette to follow in 1890 and 1892.

By the time Melville died in 1891, Eleanor and Frances were old enough to spend quality time with him during their visits to East 26th Street from the Thomas home in East Orange, New Jersey. They each enjoyed short walks with him to nearby Madison Square park as well as longer excursions uptown to Central Park to see the animals in the Zoo or glide in the swan boats on the lake. They were each fascinated with his wiry beard, with the books in his study, and with various pictures and other artworks seen throughout the house. Frances in her 1965 “Recollections” recalled building play houses with Schopenhauer books from his library and being frightened by the pictures of whales with boats in their jaws on the stairway up to the third floor (Osborne, 181-84; CAT 170 and 171). Eleanor in her 1953 biography of Melville recalled her youthful attraction to the drawings in his copy of Vedder’s Rubáiyát as well as the way he would point with his cane to his framed colored engraving of the Bay of Naples in the front hall every time they returned “from a trip to Central Park, the Mecca of most of our pilgrimages" (Metcalf, 282-83; CAT 60 and 120, MBB 1.4). The photo of the four granddaughters below (fig. 8) was taken near the time of the death of their grandmother Elizabeth in 1906.

Melville never, so far as we know, had a family photo or painting in which he and Elizabeth were pictured with all four of their children during the twelve years (1855-1867) in which all six members of their nuclear family were alive. Although we have no group portrait of his own family comparable to the one van Ostade had painted of his family in 1654, Melville did have, in his daughter Frances and her daughters Eleanor, Frances, Katharine, and Jeanette, direct descendants who saw the value of preserving his literary and pictorial legacy for future generations. Eleanor was a major figure in the Melville revival that had made him a major literary figure by the mid-twentieth century, not only by making the unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd available to literary scholars in the 1920s, but by donating many of the surviving books from his library to Harvard University in the 1940s, by publishing the unpublished manuscript of his  Journal of his Visit to London and the Continent in 1948, and by publishing her own biography of Melville in 1853. She was also personally responsible for making this website possible, by donating 278 uncataloged engravings she had preserved from Melville’s personal art collection to the Berkshire Athenaeum in 1952. All of these activities made her the living equivalent of the “wingéd angel” that illustrates verse 98 in Melville’s copy of Elihu Vedder’s edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that she had preserved for many decades before donating it to Harvard in the 1940s (fig. 9; for more detail, see MBB 1.4).

During their adult lives, Eleanor Melville Thomas Metcalf was notable (and in some cases notorious) among her younger sisters (and some of their descendants living today) for her persistence in rounding up (with a view toward preserving) every print that could possibly be salvaged from their grandfather’s art collection. And all three of those younger sisters—Frances Cuthbert Thomas Osborne, Katharine Gansevoort Thomas Binnian, and Jeanette Ogden Thomas Chapin—not only donated prints that are now being preserved with those from Eleanor at the Berkshire Athenaeum but retained prints that have since been preserved by their own direct descendants in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, and Ohio.

Melville’s own nuclear family never achieved the seeming harmony, evident breadth, and relative prosperity attributed to that of van Ostade in the passage about the painter’s Family Portrait that Melville marked so assiduously in his own copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. But one expects he would be not only delighted but surprised to see so many prints from his art collection preserved by the direct descendants and beneficiaries of his daughter Frances Melville Thomas (for more detail, see “Saved by his Granddaughters” in our essay on “Herman Melville as Print Collector”). Herman had gotten off to a difficult start with his future son-in-law Henry Thomas. When Henry, when calling on Frances for the first time, stayed too late into the evening, Melville strode into the front parlor and drove him away by shouting, “Young man, do you prefer oatmeal or mush for breakfast!” Frances had feared he would never come back (Osborne, 180).