Man Smoking
In addition to Hazlitt’s “books, pictures, and the face of nature,” Melville had another “pleasure pure and lasting” that he enjoyed to the end of his life: pipe smoking. We don’t know exactly when he began the habit (see Bryant, Half-Known Life, chapters 19 and 35), and we don’t know if he smoked as much as Stubb does in Moby-Dick, or whether he smoked in bed like Queequeg does in the Spouter-Inn, or whether he ever “tossed his still lighted pipe” into the sea like Ahab in “The Pipe” (NN MD, chapters 27, 11, and 30), but testimony from friends and family leaves no doubt that he enjoyed smoking his own pipe while building his print collection during the last two decades of his life. One kind of evidence of that habit is the small collection of his own pipes currently being preserved in the Melville Memorial Room at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield. Another is the circular burn mark on one of prints he had collected from the French edition of Réveil’s engravings after Flaxman’s Purgatorio (fig. 10):
Figure 10. Étienne Achille Reveil after John Flaxman. Dans le cercle des ombres colères, le Dante aveuglé par le fumée qui s’en exhale, s’appuie sur l’épaule de Virgile. Plate 20 (from canto 16) in Purgatoire du Dante. Paris: Audot, 1833.
The title of this French-language print translates as The Region of Smoke in Melville’s English-language copy of the Purgatorio (see our CAT 99). The burn spot in the lower margin of the print goes very well with the smoke of the image itself (and with the French phrases “le cercle des ombres colères” and “le fumée qui s’en exhale”). One imagines that the pipe-smoking print collector dropped a burning ember onto this print accidentally, but he could not have chosen a better print on which to make this mark.
We have already seen smoking scenes by Teniers and Brauwer to which Melville had access during his travels and in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters (CAT 202, figures 5, 6, 7, 8). Here we will track access he would have had to smoking scenes by van Ostade. The first smoking scene by van Ostade he would have seen on his youthful trip to England and the Continent in 1849 is probably the one he saw at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on November 17. The journal entry he wrote the next morning began by saying “the gallery is full of gems.” Those gems included “Titians, Claudes, Salvators, Murillos.” Specific paintings included “The Peasant Boys—The Venus—The Peasant Girl—Cardinal Beaufort—The mottled horse of Wouvermans—St John—The Assumption—The old man & pipe—Mrs. Siddons as Tragic Muse" (NM J 20). Melville’s “old man & pipe” is the Man Smoking you can still see at the Dulwich Gallery today (fig. 11). It is an oil on panel about ten inches high, signed and dated by van Ostade 1647.
Fig. 11. Adriaen van Ostade. Man Smoking, oil on panel, 1647. Dulwich Picture Gallery.
One reason young Melville may have included the above painting among all the other “gems” he remembered from the Dulwich Gallery is that he was by now a pipe smoker himself. Two days earlier, after a day of sightseeing in London, he had gone with his friend George Adler to the “Edingburgh Castle,” famous for its “fine Scotch ale,” where he had “a glorious chop & a pancake a pint & a half of ale, a cigar & a pipe, & talked high German metaphysics meanwhile.” On the day after that, after visiting the publisher John Murray, strolling around London, and seeing a comedy by Colley Cibber, he “stopped at the Cock Tavern . . . drank two glasses of Stout” and “smoked a pipe also.” The next day, after seeing the paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, he “returned to the Edingburgh Castle & paid my compliments to a chop. Smoked a long pipe” (NN J 18-20).
The next smoking scene by van Ostade that Melville is certain to have seen is the one in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that he acquired in December 1871. This engraving of A Dutch Smoking Room (fig. 12) is one of nine illustrations after works by van Ostade in Melville’s copy of Works. The smokers in this tavern scene are quite similair to those in paintings we have seen by Brouwer and Teniers.
Figure 12. The Dutch Smoking Room—From a Painting by Adriaan van Ostade in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
The first smoking scene by van Ostade that Melville was likely to see in the United States was The Smoker, another painting of a single man with a pipe, that came to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City as part of its Original Purchase in 1871 (fig. 12). This painting was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum which opened on February 17, 1872 at the Dodworth Building between 53rd and 54th Streets on Fifth Avenue. Young Henry James, who reviewed the exhibition for The Atlantic magazine, praised van Ostade’s The Smoker as one of the finest paintings in the show, a work of “the greatest charm,” a “delicious cabinet-piece.” Here “sits a ‘Smoker,’ filling his pipe amid a wealth of mellow shadows. His figure is full of homely truth and finish, but the only bit of detail is a door vaguely opening in the brown gloom behind, to admit a person whom you hardly discern. This work, a veritable gem, is almost misplaced in a general collection. It ought to hang on the library-wall of the most fastidious of amateurs, and be shown solemnly to a chosen friend, who holds his breath for fear or tarnishing its lucid bloom” (761).
Fig. 13. Adriaen van Ostade. A Smoker, 11 ½ x 10 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Original Purchase 1871. Sold at Christie’s, New York, January 11, 1989, no. 166. [no. 47 in Katharine Baetjer, 2004]
We do not know if Melville visited the inaugural exhibition of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum soon after it opened in February 1872 (five days after the funeral of his brother Allan and six weeks before the death of his mother Maria). But he would have had plenty of chances to see it until his death in 1891 because van Ostade’s Smoker remained part of the museum’s permanent collection until it was deaccessioned and auctioned at Christie’s in 1989 (Baetjer, A-1, no. 47, pp. 228-29). Even after the Museum moved farther uptown to its new building at 80th Street and Fifth Avenue in 1880, Melville would have had relatively easy access to it after his work station was transferred to the Customs House facility at 79th Street on the East River. After he retired from the Customs House in December 1885, he would have had much more time than ever to visit the Metropolitan Museum.
Beginning in December 1888, he would have had a lot more paintings to see when the Museum made the first addition to its Central Park building and doubled its exhibition space. From November 1890 to April 1891, while Melville was still actively revising “At the Hostelry,” van Ostade’s A Smoker was exhibited in the Old Eastern Galleries along with paintings by the following Dutch and Flemish Old Masters whose prints he collected or who appear in "At the Hostelry”: Rubens, Rembrandt, Hals, van Dyck, Teniers, van Tilborgh, Steen, Netscher, Both, Berghem, Cuyp, Hobbema, and Wouvermans (Handbook No. 6, November 1891 to April 1891, Gallery Y, pp. 6-12, Gallery X, pp. 15-16).
Beginning in December 1888, Melville would have been able to see a smoking scene by van Ostade’s first master Frans Hals in Gallery O of the new addition. Then the painting (fig. 14 below) was called Sketch of a Smoker (no. 30) and the Gallery O was called Gallery of Old Masters Loaned to the Museum (General Guide for the exhibition of 1888-89, pp. 9-10). By May of 1890 the painting was called The Smoker, the gallery was called the New Eastern Gallery O, and Henry G. Marquand was identified as the donor. The Hand-Boook for that exhibition described Hals himself (1584-1666) as “a jovial companion” and the central figure in this painting as “a young peasant negligently dressed in a brown jacket, with disordered hair, turned three quarters left, looking front, and smoking a long clay-pipe” (Handbook No. 10, Collection of Old Masters and Pictures of the English School, May 1890, pp. 12-13).
Figure 14. Franz Hals. The Smoker, oil on wood, c. 1623-25. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Henry Marquand, 1889.
The website of the Museum today notes the “smiling companion” who is embracing the central figure as he “indulges in the newfangled device of smoking tobacco, a recent import from the New World that greatly troubled Dutch moralists. The loose brushwork on the octagonal panel—its original shape—captures the bustle of a tavern interior” (accessed 11/27/23).
Although Adriaen van Ostade does not himself appear in Melville’s unfinished poem “At the Hostelry,” his companion Adrian Brouwer (from his early days with Frans Hals) and his student Jan Steen (from his mature years as an artist) are the leading spokesmen for the Dutch genre approach to the pictorial picturesque they all shared with David Teniers the Younger and Gillis van Tilborgh. When Steen, who had first floated his convivial concept of the picturesque in section 2 of the poem, returns in response to a sophisticated sally from Veronese, he is reintroduced by the narrator as a “sapient spendthrift in shabby raiment, smoking his tavern-pipe and whiffing out his unconventional philosophy.” When Steen speaks for himself in response to Veronese, he does so “With fellowly yet thoughtful mien, / Puffing at his skull-bowl pipe serene." In between puffs, he delivers a nineteen-line monologue whose central contention is: “All’s picturesque beneath the sun.” For Steen, “’tis life, plain life I limn / . . . the life that’s wine and brine, / That mingled brew; the thing as spanned / By Jan who kept the Leyden tavern / And every rollicker fellowly scanned” (BB BBO 160-62).