Dutch and Flemish Paintings (and Etchings) at the Metropolitan Museum 1888-89

This expansion, to the south of the original building, doubled its previous exhibition space. This can be seen in the diagram of the second-floor galleries that appeared in the General Guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition of 1888-89 (fig. 2 below). 

The New Western Galleries S & R in the lower left corner of the diagram were entirely devoted to the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection of contemporary French paintings. The Old Western Galleries V & U in the upper left corner of the diagram included contemporary French paintings not from the Wolfe Collection. Seeing the galloping horses in Meissonier’s Friedland, 1807  and the rearing horses in Bonheur’s The Horse Fair together in Gallery V would have been an extraordinary sight (General Guide, pp. 13-14). 

 In the exhibition of Modern Masters that filled Gallery V from November 1890 to April 1891, Meissonier’s Friedland and Bonheur’s Horse Fair were joined by Manet’s Boy with a Sword  and Girl with a Parrot  (nos. 23, 71, 78, and 124  in Hand Book No. 1, November 1890 to April 1891). Any French connoisseurs who ventured all the way to Fifth Avenue from Paris would have to admit that their pictorial culture was becoming well represented in the Old and New Western galleries on the Second Floor.    

 
Most of the works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Teniers, van Tilborgh, van Ostade and the 19 other Dutch and Flemish Old Masters collected by Melville were exhibited in the Eastern galleries on the other side of the building. The Old Eastern Gallery Y in the top right corner of the diagram exhibited paintings by Dutch, Flemish, and other Old Masters that are “the property of the Museum” (many of them going back to the original purchase of 1871). The adjacent Old Eastern Gallery X was exhibiting Old Master paintings loaned to the Museum as well as those that were Recent Gifts to the Museum (one of the latter being the Heraclitus and Democritus  by Jacob Jordaens  that Melville’s sister-in-law Jane Melville had given to the Museum in 1884). 

The New Eastern Gallery O in the lower right corner of the diagram was then exhibiting a “very choice and costly” collection of Old Masters on loan to the the Museum. The thirty-seven paintings in this anonymous loan collection belonged to Henry G. Marquand, who donated them all to the Museum in November 1989. Twenty-two of those “choice” paintings were by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, five of those by Rembrandt (General Guide, pp. 9-10). In November 1890 Herman Doomer and the Van Beresteyn portraits arrived in Old Eastern Gallery X as the first three of five Rembrandts to be loaned to the Museum by H. O. Havemeyer. They were joined by his other two Rembrandts in May 1891. 

The close proximity of so many Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings in the Eastern Galleries X, Y, and O would have been quite convenient to Melville as a print collector and poet who was actively engaging with Old Master artists when revising the manuscript of “At the Hostelry” and publishing poems about art in Timoleon during the first two years of the Museum’s expansion. Melville would also have been highly interested the Drawings of Old Masters on display in Gallery L when the New Building opened in December 1888. Hand-Book No. 8 for this exhibition listed 851 drawings (primarily by Italian Old Masters) that had been acquired from the Vanderbilt Collection in 1880 and the Thompson Collection in 1887. This exhibition included original drawings by the following artists who were represented in Melville’s print collection or alluded to in “At the Hostelry”: Stefano della Bella (9), Pietro da Cortona (7), François Boucher (3), Annibale Carracci (14), Claude Lorrain (8), Paolo Veronese (12), Michael Angelo (8), Domenichino (7), Durer (2), Francesco Francia (2), Rembrandt (9), Jean Jouvenet (1), Leonardo da Vinci (2), Adrian van Ostade (1), Sebastiano del Piombo (2), Nicholas Poussin (3), Raphael (5), Guido Reni (15), Ribera, “Lo Spagnoletto” (7), Tintoretto (15), Salvator Rosa (20), Rubens (4), Ruysdael (1), David Teniers, elder and younger (4), Van Dyck (6), Titian (12), and Francesco Zuccarelli (1) (Handbook No. 8: Drawings, Water-Color Paintings, Photographs, and Etchings, pp. 2-52). 

Gallery L provided the only access to the intimate Alcove of Water-Colors identified as Gallery M on the above diagram for the Second Floor.  As announced in the Museum’s General Guide for the 1888-89 Exhibition, this Alcove included not only a collection of watercolor paintings by W. T. Richards but also “two etchings by Waltner (after Rembrandt).” One of the latter was the very large etching, mezzotint, and aquatint on vellum after Rembrandt’s Night-Watch that Charles-Albert Waltner had published as Le Ronde de Nuit in Paris, London, and New York City in 1887 (29 x 35 inches; figure 3 below).   

 
One can imagine how much Melville would have savored this large, sophisticated, brand-new print while standing before it in the relative intimacy of Alcove M on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum any time between its installation in 1888 and his death in 1891. As we have already noted, The Night Watch (figure 4), had been one of two paintings by Rembrandt that Melville noted in his journal after visiting the Trippenhuis, the Amsterdam “Picture Gallery” that was later incorporated into the Rijksmuseum, in April 1857 (NN J 127).

Waltner’s print of The Night Watch in Alcove M would have provided Melville with much more than a memory of the painting he had seen in Amsterdam three decades earlier. As a print collector who had since acquired a sophisticated understanding of the differences between etching, mezzotint, and aquatint from the prints he collected as well as from his copies of The Wonders of Engraving, The Works of Eminent Masters, and Mollett’s Rembrandt, Melville would have been able to see the virtuosity with which Waltner in 1887 had employed and integrated three different printmaking techniques in order to translate the shapes and colors, and the lights and shadows, of Rembrandt’s oil painting on canvas into the shapes, colors, lights, and shadows of his own layers of ink on vellum.   

Waltner’s print of The Night Watch was published in New York by Michael Knoedler and Company, the local successor to Goupil and Cie. Michael Knoedler was the dealer from whom the Metropolitan Museum had acquired the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection of paintings in 1887 (see “Charles Waltner’s Huge Etching of Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’”). Melville may well have seen Waltner’s print of The Night Watch in Knoedler’s display room as well as at the Metropolitan Museum, as it was located on Fifth Avenue and 22nd Street, only a few short blocks from Melville’s home at 104 East 26th street (see our “Parting Thought to the Salons of 1879 and 1880”).  

Although the General Guide to the 1888-89 exhibition specified “two etchings by Waltner (after Rembrandt),” the second etching after Rembrandt in that exhibition was actually by Charles Koepping (also known as Karl Köpping). I am grateful to Elizabeth Zanis, Collections Specialist in the Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, for finding an entry in her department’s card catalog for Koepping’s large print after Rembrandt’s The Syndics, published by Charles Sedelmeyer Meyer in Paris on October 1, 1887. The unusually large dimensions for this print (25 ½ x 36 3/8 inches) match those of Waltner’s etching of The Night Watch. Both of these large, ambitious etchings after Rembrandt were given to the Museum in 1887 by George Gordon King. Their official accession numbers are 87.1.1 and 87.1.2. 

The card catalog for the Koepping etching does not offer direct evidence for its having been exhibited with Waltner’s Night Watch in Gallery M during the opening exhibition at the New Building in 1888-89. But one line of the short entry does read “Hand-Book No. 8, p. 56.15.” That Hand-Book No. 8 is the one specifying the Old Master Drawings, Water-Color Paintings, Photographs, and Etchings exhibited in the 1888-89 inaugural exhibition. We have already referred to the list of 851 Old Master drawings on pages 2-47 of that Hand-Book. Page 55 of that Hand-Book lists only two etchings, each “presented to the Museum by Mr. G. G. King, 1887.” One is Waltner’s etching of The Nightwatch after Rembrandt (in an “edition of limited to 50; plate destroyed, and a piece of it given to each subscriber to the first state”). The other is Koepping’s etching of The Syndics of the Draper’s Corporation after Rembrandt (“artist’s proof on Japan paper; edition limited to 125; plate destroyed”).  

In its size, as well as its virtuosity, Koepping’s etching after The Syndics would have been a fit companion for Waltner’s etching after The Night Watch in Gallery M, the alcove accessible only from the Old Master Drawings in Gallery L during the inaugural exhibition of the New Building in 1888-89. Kopping’s etching is now in deep storage at the Metropolitan Museum, and has not yet been entered in the website for the Prints and Drawings at the Museum, so I will reproduce a copy of the same print currently in another collection (fig. 5). 

As a collector prints and books about Rembrandt, and of books and essays about various engraving techniques, Melville would have been keenly interested in this state-of-the-art echthing of another of Rembrandt’s most famous paintings.  The dark tonality of this particular etching goes well with Rembrandt’s one appearance in Melvlle’s “At the Hostelry,” when Brouwer, after praising Teniers for the “umberish haze” that overlays many of his indoor smoking scenes, turns to Rembrandt with praise for “Your sooty stroke! / ‘Tis you, old sweep, believe in smoke.” But Rembrandt, “reserved in self-control, / Jostled by that irreverent droll, / Seemed not to hear, nor silence broke” (NN BBO 157). 

Seeing the dark tonalities of Koepping’s etching of The Syndics in an alcove of the New Addition to the Second Floor of the Metropolitan Museum after the 1888 installation would of course have reminded Melville of his visit to the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam in 1857, when he had taken special notice of “The Syndics of Rembrandt & The Night Watch (shadows)” among the extraordinary collection of Dutch masterpieces now housed in the Rijksmuseum (NN J 127). Apart from its subtle and rich tonalities, Rembrandt’s depiction of The Syndics of the Clothmaking Guild has long been admired for the departure Rembrandt made by having all six figures looking out toward viewer rather than toward each other (see fig. 6  below).  

To see two brand-new, large-scale etchings of the two Rembrandt paintings he had most admired in Amsterdam twenty years earlier exhibited next to each other in an intimate alcove of the spacious new addition to the Metropolitan Museum would have been a special pleasure to Melville as a print collector keenly interested in the art of Rembrandt. In April 1857, Melville had been an exhausted novelist nearing the end of a long voyage across the Atlantic and around the Mediterranean, and then up through the galleries of Italy and northern Europe intended to restore his health and his spirits. By December 1888, he had become a sophisticated print collector and an active poet for whom visual art was a continuing source of joy and inspiration. What a happy accident that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, created in New York in 1871 as Melville was beginning to build his print print collection, had flourished as fully as it had during the two decades in which Melville’s print collecting, book collecting, and poetic expression had become so deeply intertwined. 

Koeppel’s etching of The Syndics and Waltner’s etching of The Night Watch would have had different personal associations for Melville in the late 1880s than Rembrandt’s original paintings would have had in 1857. The work Melville had done from 1866 through 1885 as an inspector of shipments moving through the U. S. Custom House in New York City would have given him a special appreciation for the responsibilities of the syndics of the Clothmaking Guild in Amsterdam. His poetic immersion in the American Civil War when writing Battle-Pieces in the 1860s, and his pictorial immersion in the wars of northern Europe when collecting prints (and books) after Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, would have given him a richer understanding of the civic military mobilization depicted in The Night Watch than when he stood before the painting itself in Amsterdam. Each of those paintings from late in Rembrandt’s life, reinterpreted by etchings from late in Melville’s life, express elements of the Dutch culture from which Melville’s ancestor Harmen Harmense Gansevoort emigrated to the future site of Albany, New York, in the late 1650s.  

For readers who wish to see how the South Façade of the First Addition to the Original Building in Central Park appears to visitors to the Museum today, here is a photo I took on my way to the Study Room for Drawings and Prints on September 26, 2023 (fig. 7).