From "The Bench of Boors" to "At the Hostelry"

One Teniers tavern scene remains to be mentioned. It appears to have been the only painting by Teniers in the private gallery of Samuel Rogers when young Melville visited on December 19 and again December 22, 1849. In the 1844 edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art, the painting is described as “Exterior of an Inn—Boors Regaling” (no. 51, Appendix IX). Anna Jameson, in the 1844 edition of her Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London, describes it as “Five Boors drinking outside a Dutch Cabaret” (no. 56, p. 408). The Catalogue for the 1856 estate sale of Rogers’s Very Celebrated Collection of Art was slightly more expansive: “A group of five peasants, seated round a table smoking, before a cabaret; a wooden building in the background” (no. 553, p. 47).

One expects that young Melville would have been particularly interested in that smoking scene by Teniers a few days after having finally sold to the London publisher Richard Bentley the manuscript White-Jacket whose published version included this smoking scene of his own: “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). 

So far I have not been able to trace the fate of the smoking scene by Teniers after its being listed in the estate sale from the Rogers collection in 1856. Nor have I as yet been able to find the specific “Flemish picture” most likely to have “suggested” the “Bench of Boors” as depicted in Melville’s 1891 poem. The closest match I have so far found to the description of “five peasants, seated round a table smoking” in the Teniers painting in the 1856 sales catalogue is the engraving by Pierre Chenu after a painting by Teniers published in Paris 1753 and acquired by the British Museum in London 1850 (fig. 6).  

The British Museum website describes the above image as “a tavern scene with five peasants smoking and drinking in the right foreground, the right one holding a large jug.” But it also correctly translates the title of the print (Les amusements des matelots) as “The Pleasures of Sailors,” leaving it open as to whether the five figures who are smoking pipes as they drink from the jug are peasants from the farm or sailors from the sea. One imagines that young Melville, the nautical novelist who had recently created a shipboard smoking scene in White-Jacket by taking “a Flemish kitchen full of good fellows from Teniers” and “adding a fire-side group from Wilkie,” would have savored both the smoking scene by Teniers in the private collection of Samuel Rogers in December 1849 and engravings such as Les Amusements des Matelots reproduced immediately above. By the time Melville as an elderly poet published "The Bench of Boors" as a tribute to Teniers in 1891, his memory of smoking scenes he had seen in London in 1849, in Turin and Amsterdam in 1857, would have been enriched by the Le ballet Rustique Flamand in his print collection and other Teniers paintings he would have seen in Gallery X, Y, and O at the Metropolitan Museum. 

By the time Melville published “The Bench of Boors” in Timoleon in May 1891, he was still actively revising the manuscript of “At the Hostelry,” his ambitious poetic colloquy about the nature of the pictorial picturesque among Dutch, Flemish, French, Spanish, and Italian Old Master painters. The imagined colloquy takes place in a tavern capacious enough to allow two dozen Old Masters of contrasting nations and aesthetic persuasions to debate in a lively but leisurely way. Appropriately, Adraien Brouwer and Jan Steen take the lead in advocating and defending the Dutch and Flemish proclivity for low-life realism against the more elevated pretensions and contentions of Italian and French Old Masters. Melville does not appear to have collected prints after paintings by Brouwer or Steen, but each is well-represented Melville’s copies of The Works of Eminent Masters and Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland (Sealts no. 564 and 233). As Melville would have known from each of those publications, Brouwer and Steen were each ideally suited for advocating and defending Dutch and Flemish realism in the ebb and flow of a debate taking place in a tavern. (A hostelry was a Dutch inn or tavern equipped to house and feed the horses of patrons who stayed overnight.)

Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638) was a Flemish painter who was also active in the Dutch Republic. He looks quite sophisticated in the etching by Van Dyck that introduces the essay on Brouwer in The Works of Eminent Masters (fig. 7). He was well-connected with a variety of Dutch and Flemish painters. As a boy in Harlem, he had studied (and lived) with Franz Hals, with Adrien van Ostade, one of his fellow students. After moving to Antwerp in the early 1630's, Brouwer was befriended by Rubens, who had helped to recue him from a local prison. In Antwerp Brouwer was also closely associated with Teniers the Younger, not only in documenting the lives of peasants in taverns but as a fellow member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a very influential association of artists.

The essay on Brouwer in Melville’s copy of Works is illustrated with three large-scale reproductions of paintings after Brouwer, each providing a close-up image of peasants enjoying themselves (or fighting among themselves) in a tavern. The fight occurs in the engraving labeled “Tavern Brawl—from a painting by Brauwer” (1: 152). One kind of enjoyment is depicted “The Fiddler—from a painting by Brauwer" (1: 149). Another kind of enjoyment is shown in “The Drinkers—from a painting by Brauwer” (1: 150). This tavern scene by Brouwer (fig. 8) resembles the above two by Teniers (figs. 6 and 7) in showing a small group of peasants drinking and smoking around a table or a barrel, but Brouwer focuses entirely on the up-close depiction of the primary group in the foreground, eschewing the broader and more distant viewpoint from which Teniers also shows us the varied activities of other revelers back in another room of the tavern. As many commentors have noted, Brouwer often gives the viewer a sense of participating in the active fellowship of the primary figures, whereas Teniers provides the sense witnessing such a scene from more of a distance. 

Melville in his authorial preface to “At the Hostelry” (“To M. de Grandvin”) introduces himself as “an acolyte member” of “the brethren of the guild of St. Luke” (NN BBO 148). Melville’s Adrian Brouwer bursts into sight in section 4 of the poem, which has started off with some polite “by-play” between Hals and Van Dyck before the larger discussion about the “essence” and “efflorescence” of “the Picturesque.” We first see Brouwer “with ruddled face, / His wine-stained vesture—hardly new,-- / Buttoned with silver florins true.” He enters the discussion in response to Tintoretto, the Venetian painter who, with his “limp, lax air,” declares “this Picturesque” to be “scarce my care,” leaving others to pursue it in “Rome’s squalid Ghetto, / In Algiers at the lazaretto, / In many a grimy slimy lair.” At that last phrase, Brouwer declares his own devotion to “grime” and “slime.” After briefly tweaking Carlo Dolce for his “sweetness,” Brouwer turns to Teniers with his own catalog of a picturesque aesthetic they to some degree share: 

Hey, Teniers?  Give us boors at inns  

Mud floor—dark settles—jugs—old bins,  

Under rafters foul with fume that blinks  

From logs too soggy much to blaze  

Which yet defuse an umberish haze 

That beautifies the grime, methinks.  

Before Teniers can respond, Brouwer reminds Rembrandt of “Your sooty stroke! / ‘Tis you, old sweep, believe in smoke.” But Rembrandt “Seemed not to hear, nor silence broke” (NN BB0 156-57). Brouwer will return later in the poem, but his words are the last words we hear of Teniers. 

Melville clearly thought of Brouwer beyond the vivid role he provides for him in “At the Hostelry.” He marked the essay on Brouwer in Works more than almost any other artist. On page 146 he marked one passage about how “his rude apprenticeship in Hals’ garret . . . made him prone to the free enjoyment of life” and another about his virtuosity and “facetiousness” as a trickster. On page 147 he marked two paragraphs in the left column with vertical lines along both the inner and outer margins, a rare practice for him (see fig. 9). The text of the top paragraph, after complaining that Brouwer’s “buffoon humor” became “more repulsive” with age, was grateful that this artist has “achieved better things than pasquinades, and has rendered his name immortal by some masterpieces of expression, touch, and colouring, to which the graver of Visscher has lent new life. . . . What verve, what life, and what accuracy do they not display! No where else, save in the reality, do we find those grimaces, those red and bloated faces, that coarse merriment of tatterdemalions, and those indescribable attitudes and postures of beastly drunkenness.”  

The second paragraph doubly marked by Melville begins by declaring that “it would, doubtless, have been far better for such a painter if his life were totally unknown to us, and nothing remained of him except these admirable little works, which might lead us only to suspect his taste for carousel. But it would seem as if history had a predilection for scandal, if we may juedge from the complacency with which she records all the follies and wickedesses of her heroes, while she is silent regarding so many charming artists who needed nothing but the éclat of a great vice to make them famous, and hand down their names to posterity” (147). The comparable irony during the last two decades of Melville’s life, when he was building both his print collection and his impressive library of books about art, is that he was remembered, if at all, not for the novels and short stories of the 1840s and 1850s that we admire so much today, but as “the man who lived among the cannibals.”  

The essay on Brouwer in The Works of Eminent Masters ended with impressive documentation of his career as known in 1854, listing the titles of 19 etchings created by Brouwer himself, the names of 31 engravers who had reproduced works by Brouwer, and the various prices at which various paintings had been sold in Europe between 1745 and 1845. Its list of five painters who had been “pupils” of Brouwer included Tilborg (Terburg) and Jan Steen. Gower’s chapter on Brouwer in Melville’s 1882 New York edition of The Figure Painters of Holland questions whether earlier biographers had overstated some of the dissoluteness of Brouwer’s life, but retells many of the same stories about his escape from servitude to Hals facilitated by van Ostade and his residence with Rubens after being rescued from prison, adding that the Rubens household was too “stately and well-regulated for Brouwer, “who afterwards declared that he could not tell which was the worst to stay in, the prison or Rubens’s palace.” Gower in 1882 is able to document the locations of Brouwer’s relatively scarce paintings more fully than the Works essay was able to do, but he gives no attention to the 19 etchings created by Brouwer himself or the thirty-plus engravers who had reproduced his paintings. The one painting Gower reproduces is the one engraved as The Drinkers in Works (figure 8 above), here called The Topers (9-13, 83-85).