Van de Velde and Lairesse
The two painters in this section were contemporaries of the Dutch and Flemish figure painters in our previous entries, but with a difference. Each completed his career by moving far from the location or ethos of the Dutch pictorial world into which he came of age.
Willem van der Velde the Younger (1633-1707) was born in Leiden and began his career in Amsterdam. There he mastered the art of painting ships and the sea while assisting his father in documenting two major naval conflicts with the English, the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the early 1650s and mid-1660s. In 1672 the father and son both moved to London, where they received Royal Commissions to continue their practice of depicting naval ships and warfare. Many large-scale paintings by the Younger incorporated meticulous drawings the Elder had made in the midst of actual battles. Living the last 35 years of his life in London, Willem van de Velde the Younger became the father of English marine painting. Young Melville would have seen many of his seascapes at Hampton Court, the Dulwich Gallery, the National Gallery, and the Painted Hall at Greenwich during his first visit to London in 1849.
Gerard Lairesse (1641-1711) was born in Liege, settled in Utrecht, and moved to Amsterdam, where he established himself as an artist in the late 1660s. Originally influenced by the Dutch realism of Rembrandt, he soon gravitated more toward the classical French allegorical style of Poussin, receiving lavish commissions for public and private sites in Amsterdam and other cities until around 1690, when he was blinded by congenital syphilis. Unable to paint, Lairesse became an influential art theorist, publishing treatises which he denigrated the Dutch realist school of Rembrandt and other Golden Age painters in favor of complex mythical and historical allegories such as his own Hercule entre le Vice et la Virtu (CAT 212), a painting young Melville would have seen at the Louvre in 1849.
The prints Melville collected after paintings by van de Velde and Lairesse, exemplify the impressive eclecticism of his pictorial taste: formative paintings in the Dutch/Anglo maritime tradition and in the Dutch/Franco allegorical tradition. The careers of these artists also show the permeability of the national “schools” into which painters are customarily assigned.
Works cited for van de Velde and Lairesse:
Bachrach, Fred. Turner’s Holland. London: Tate Gallery, 1994.
Berthold, Dennis. “Ekphrastic Composites in ‘At the Hostelry’: Van de Veldes, Tromps, and Trompes l’Oeil.” Leviathan 9.3 (October 2007): 97-103.
Blankert, Albert, et. al. Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-Century Painting. Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2000.
Butlin, Martin, and Evelyn Joll. The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner: Text. Rev. Ed. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
Buvelot, Quentin, et. al. Frans van Mieris, 1635-1681. The Hague (Mauritshuis) and Washington, D. C. (National Gallery), 2005.
Cook, Jonathan. “Moby-Dick, Myth, and Classical Moralism: Bulkington as Hercules.” Leviathan 5 (March 2003): 15-28.
“Gerard de Lairesse, “Apollo and Aurora,” https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436843
“Hercule entre le vice et la virtu, par Lairese.” In Le Musee Royal. . . Recueil de Gravures.” Paris: F. Didot, 1818.
“Hercules between Vice and Virtue.” The Works of Eminent Masters. 2: 87, 93.
Horn, Hendrik J., and Rieke van Leeuwen, eds. Houbraken Translated. Arnold Houbraken’s Great Theater of the Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses. 3 vol. RKD Studies.
Humfrey, Peter. The Stafford Gallery: The Greatest Art Collection of Regency London. Unicorn Press, 2019.
Lammertse, Friso. “Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes.” In Blankert, Dutch Classicism. Pp. 330-35.
Monkhouse, William Cosmo. Turner. New York: Scribner and Welford, 1879 (Sealts no. 365).
Naumann, Otto. Frans van Mieris (1635-1681) the Elder. Doornspijk, the Netherlands: Davaco. 1981. 2 v.
Quodbach, Esmée. The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Robinson, M. S. Van de Velde: A Catalogue of the Paintings of the Elder and the Younger Willem van de Velde. 2 v. Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1990.
Roy, Alain. Gérard de Lairesse (1640-1711). Paris: Arthena, 1992.
------. “Lairesse, Gerard de.” Grove, 19: 650-53.
Snoep, D. P. “Classicism and History Painting in the Late Seventeeth Century.” In Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt. Ed. Albert Blankert. Washington: National Gallery of Art. 237-52.
“The Steam Ram, Dunderberg.” Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1867, p. 325.
Vries, Lyckle de. Gérard de Lairesse: An Artist between Stage and Studio. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998. [maybe others from previous section]
Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Paintings in England. Reprint of 1786 edition. London: Alexander Murray, 1871 (Sealts no. 543a).
“William van de Velde II, Entrance to a Dutch Port,” https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437876
The Works of Eminent Masters in Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Decorative Art. 2 vol. in 1. London: Cassell, 1854 (Sealts no. 564).