J. B. Winckler after David Teniers the Younger. Le Ballet Rustique Flamand

When I first saw this print in the home of Melville’s great-grandson Bart Chapin in Bath, Maine, in 1994, I was charmed by the image but unable to identify the artist. This print from Melville’s collection gives no indication of the engraver, painter, title, or place or date of publication. In that pre-Google era, I was able to identify this print only after consulting Marjorie Cohn at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, Holm Bevers at the Berlin State Museum, Jane Glaubinger at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Nadine Orenstein at the New York Metropolitan Museum. Full as it is of action, Melville’s print shows only the central portion of the Village Festival now at the Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 1), painted by David Teniers the Younger in the middle of the seventeenth century and engraved as Le Ballet Rustique Flamand by J. B. Winckler a century later (Chong, 235; Le Blanc 4: 237). 

Winckler’s engraving after the above painting shows but one element of the style of David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), a painter who appealed to Melville throughout his writing career. Melville first alluded to Teniers in Typee, when Tommo glances up to see the eyes of “a big black spectral cat, which sat erect in the doorway, looking at me with its frightful goggling green orbs, like one of those monstrous imps that torment some of Teniers’ saints!” (NN T 210-11). Melville was to see such imps tormenting a Teniers saint in the painting of The Temptation of St. Anthony during his visit to Amsterdam in 1857 (figure 2), but that was eleven years after he had published Typee when living across the river from Albany, New York. Melville had probably never seen an authentic painting by Teniers before crossing the Atlantic to immerse himself in the picture galleries of London and Paris in 1849, so the “monstrous imps” he used from a Dutch Old Master painter to enliven his adventure story on a Polynesian island probably came from engravings he has seen soon after returning from his whaling voyage in 1844. 

In White-Jacket, written in 1849 and published in 1850, Melville combines Teniers with two British painters as a way of characterizing the “metropolitan smoking club” on the American man-of-war: “Take a Flemish kitchen full of good fellows from Teniers; add a fire-side group from Wilkie; throw in a naval sketch from Cruikshank; and then stick a short pipe into every mother’s son’s mouth, and you have the smoking scene at the gallery of the Neversink” (NN WJ 387).

After visiting the Royal Gallery in Turin, Italy, in April 1857, Melville contrasted “Teniers tavern scenes” with those by Breughel.” Whereas Breughel is “always pleasing,” the “remarkable Teniers effect is produced by dwarfing, then deforming humanity.” Two weeks later at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam, Melville compared “Teniers & Breughel” for their “Dutch convivial scenes” characterized by “the abandonment of good humored content” (NN J 122, 127). Such conviviality is the animates the print Melville acquired of Le Ballet Rustique Flamand. 

Winckler, by calling his print the Rustic Flemish Ballet, highlights the relative elegance with which Teniers presents the six Flemish peasants dancing in the foreground. The rest of the image is packed with pictorial action—the dog in the foreground and the gesturing man on the right, woman in the doorway, the onlookers in the upper windows on both sides, the group of discussants under the tree, the drunk being carried through the gate of the fence in the back—yet nothing detracts from the overall feeling of communal conviviality that Melville celebrated in his journal entry about Teniers and Breughel in Amsterdam.   

As a young artist in Antwerp in the 1630s, Teniers’s early paintings had been notable for their “similarity to the work of Adriaen Brouwer, who . . . brought a new freshness to the Bruegelian tradition of peasant scenes.” In 1637 Teniers “married Anna, the daughter and heiress of Jan Breughel I.” In 1640s and 1650s “he began to draw and paint open air peasant fairs” that “are partly indebted to similar works by his father-in-law.” Typically, “they are set in front of an inn,” where the “the smoky and monochrome tonality of the interiors from the 1630s is replaced by a luminous, silvery atmosphere,” conveying “a far more positive attitude to country life and the peasantry than the satirical pieces influenced by Brouwer” (Vlieghe 461-63). 

Melville had a festive engraving after Teniers very similar to one engraved by Winckler in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters he acquired in December 1871 (Sealts no. 564). The feature on David Teniers the Younger begins a famous visit by Rubens when young David was “not yet fifteen.” The one-page essay features a reproduction of “A Flemish Fair—from a Painting of David Teniers” (fig. 3 below).” This Flemish Fair is a country cousin to Melville’s Rustic Flemish Ballet. The dancers in the foreground are dressed almost identically; this time the sole dog is bounding off to the left.  

“What a life-like picture,” writes the commentator in Works. “All motion and hilarity, every figure is in full swing—dancing and meaning to dance; one can almost fancy that we hear the shrill shriek of the bagpipe and the laughter of the boors.” Whether painting this scene in the manner of Breughel, or interior scenes inspired by Brouwer, “Teniers could adopt a style, and so faithfully assume the touch, manner, design, and colour of another artist, that it were a hard matter to tell the original from the copy.”  But “what Teniers borrowed, he made altogether his own; the theory of skillful plagiarism being the truest originality, was verified in him” (Works 1: 256). One might well say the same of Melville’s adaptation of literary and pictorial sources, all the way from Typee in 1846 to Timoleon in 1891. 

On February 20, 1872, two months after Melville acquired and inscribed his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted its first public exhibition in the space it had leased in the Dodworth Building at 681 First Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets. Now New Yorkers could see for the first time the 174 Old Master paintings that the Trustees of the as yet homeless Museum Corporation had acquired in what was soon to been celebrated as “The Purchase of 1871.” The great majority of paintings in this exhibition were by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, as indicated by the review entitled “The Dutch and Flemish Paintings in New York” that young Henry James published in the June 1872 issue of Atlantic Monthly.  

After declaring that the paintings on display created “an enviably solid foundation for future acquisition and development” by this newly chartered museum, James commented quite extensively on the “most important works” in the collection. Noting the absence of paintings by Rembrandt, James did discuss individual works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Terburg, Netscher, Teniers, van Ostade, Steen, and Hobbema. The one work that James did declare to be “a masterpiece of its kind,” and perhaps “the gem of the Museum,” was the painting by David Teniers the Younger then entitled A Marriage Festival, known today as Peasants Dancing and Feasting (fig. 4).  

For James, the above painting by Teniers “presents, in remarkable purity, every merit which we commonly attribute to these vivid portrayals of rustic conviviality.” Those include “elaborate finish, humor tempered by grace, charm of color, and mingled minuteness and amplitude of design.” This painting “swarms with figures, of indescribably vivacity and variety, and glows with an undimmed clearness of tone which promises a long enjoyment of its perfections.” James hopes that this image will “speak to our children’s children with the same silvery accent, and help them to live for an hour, in this alien modern world, the life of old bucolic Flanders!” (57-60). 

Turning his attention to the dancing figures in the foreground of the painting, James uses words that apply equally to their counterparts in the print Melville acquired of Le Ballet Rustique Flamand. These “little bonhommes . . . lift their elbows and lock their hands and shake their heels with a rich hilarity which makes each miniature clown of them, whether in jacket or in kerchief, seem a distinct and complete creation. They are assembled here in a great audible swarm before a meadow-side tavern, at a couple of tables spread beneath the trees, and in scattered groups and couples of dancers in the foreground. Genuine boors as they are, however, and full of rustic breadth and roundness, they yet have a touch of grace and finesse which separates them widely from the grotesque creations of the two other noted interpreters of similar scenes here present, Jan Steen and Isaac Van Ostade.” Teniers, by this point in his career, was able to depict such rustic revelers “with an acuteness which has the advantage of not being blunted by contempt” (760). 

We do not know exactly when Melville acquired Winckler’s c. 1760 engraving after Teniers’s c. 1650 painting. Nor do we know whether he would have seen the Dutch and Flemish paintings at the inaugural 1872 exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum between its opening in February and the review by James in June. 1872 was a very difficult year for Melville and his extended family. Herman’s brother Allan died in February, leaving his widow Jane with their four daughters. Then Herman’s mother Maria died in April, bringing the whole surviving family together again for a funeral. This year the annual family summer gathering at Arrowhead was hosted alone by Allan’s widow Jane (Jenny to the family), and the Christmas gathering hosted by Herman and Elizabeth in New York was “very quiet and sad.” Elizabeth wrote to an absent relative a few days later that “the losses in our family circle come home forcibly to our hearts at these anniversary times—as you well can realize—Jenny and the girls dined with us—very quietly” (Leyda, 2: 723-79). 

If Herman did not see Teniers’s convivial festival scene at the inaugural exhibition in 1872, he had nearly two more decades in which to do so as the Metropolitan Museum moved from the Dodworth Building at 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue to the Douglas Mansion on West 14th Street and, finally, in 1880, to its permanent home at 82nd and Fifth Avenue. In the Hand-Book to Old Master Paintings in the Old Eastern Gallery Y from November 1890 to April 1891, A Marriage Festival was the first of three paintings by David Teniers the Younger to be listed; the others were Judith with the Head of Holofernes and A Dutch Kitchen (nos. 7, 57, 94). David Teniers was listed as “pupil of his father, of Brouwer, and of Rubens.” Other Dutch and Flemish painters in Gallery Y who were by then represented by prints in Melville’s collection included Jan Both, Nicholas Berghem, Adrian van Ostade, Gaspar Netscher, Gerard Terburg, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Wouverman, Anton Van Dyck, and Meindert Hobbema. As we have already noted, the Loan Collection in the adjacent Old Eastern Gallery X included the three portraits by Rembrandt and the one landscape by Albert Cuyp on loan from H. O. Havemeyer (Hand-Book No. 6, November 1890-April 1891, pp. 6-12, 15-16).