Van de Velde, Turner, and Melville
Willem Van de Velde the Younger, living in London from 1672 to 1707, became the de facto founder of the English school of marine painting. His influence is most dramatically seen in the early career of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), Melville’s favorite painter of ships at sea. We will see the range of that influence in Chapter 7, where we will display, catalog, and discuss the thirty-plus prints after Turner in Melville’s art collection, more than half of which are marine scenes on rivers and oceans. Here we will look briefly at three examples of that influence.
Precocious young Turner had become a student at the Royal Academy in London in 1789, when he was fourteen years old. He was also taking drawing lessons with other gifted young artists hosted by Dr. Thomas Munro. Later in life, looking over some prints with a friend, Turner “took up a Vandevelde and said, ‘That made me a painter’” (as Melville would have known from his 1879 copy of William Cosmo Monkhouse’s Turner, Sealts no. 365, p. 28). This van de Velde was Elisha Kirkall’s A ship scudding in a wind, an etching and mezzotint printed in sea green ink, a brilliant example of the Dutch painter’s mastery of depicting the buoyancy of a ship moving through wind, waves, and spacious gradations of light and color (fig. 2 below; see also Bachrach, fig. 1, p. 14).
Figure 2. Elisha Kirkall after Willem van de Velde the Younger. A ship scudding in a wind, etching, mezzotint, sea green, 1707. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
The next example of van de Velde’s influence on young Turner was more public. In 1800 the Third Duke of Bridgewater commissioned Turner to paint a pendant to his van de Velde oil painting Ships in a Stormy Sea (fig. 3).
Figure 3. Willem van de Velde the Younger. Ships in a Stormy Sea, oil on canvas, 1671-72. Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.
Young Turner was fully up to the challenge, exhibiting Dutch Boats in a Gale (also known as “The Bridgewater Sea Piece”) at London’s Royal Academy in 1801 (fig, 4).
Fig. 4. J. W. M. Turner. Dutch Boats in a Gale (“The Bridgewater Sea Piece”), oil on canvas, 1801. National Gallery London, on loan from the Capricorn Foundation.
Turner reversed the image and increased the drama, putting the two fishing boats in his foreground on a collision course. This painting was so successful that he was made a full member of the Royal Academy in 1802 at age twenty-seven. After the Duke of Bridgewater died one year later, his collection became the property of his nephew the Marquis of Stafford, whose expanded gallery at Cleveland House displayed Turner’s seascape alongside the one by van de Velde for the next several decades.
By the time young Herman Melville visited the picture galleries of London in 1849, the companion sea-pieces had become the property of the Earl of Ellesmere, who was in the process of building a new home in Cleveland Square for what was now to be called the Bridgewater Gallery. An essay on the new gallery in 1854 edition of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 devoted an entire paragraph to the two stormy seascapes, no longer seen together. In the front gallery was “a Vandervelde, which is considered by many the most famous specimen of the master. It is a great sea view, with stormy weather, and a rolling sea. In the front is a Dutch packet with the sea breaking over her bows, and stretching back is a long perspective of water, painted with great truth and force.” The companion painting by Turner was similar in size, in style, and in subject, but it was hung in bad light in a distant room. Even so, the skill with which the Englishman “represented squally weather, rolling seas, grand distance, fishing boats in front,” fully equaled that of the Dutchman (1:10-11).
When Melville returned to London in April 1857, the National Gallery had recently created its Turner Gallery to house the extraordinary bequest the painter had made to the British nation upon his death in 1851. During this visit to the Turner Gallery, Melville saw a number of paintings he would later collect as engravings, including The Fighting Termeraire and Peace-Burial at Sea (NN J 128, 527; CAT nos. to be assigned). At some unknown date, he also acquired J. C. Armytage’s 1859 engraving of Dutch Boats in a Gale, from the Collection of the Earl of Ellesmere (fig. 5).
Figure 5. J. C. Armytage after J. M. W. Turner. Dutch Boats in a Gale, from the Picture in the Collection of the Earl of Ellesmere. Engraved for the Turner Gallery, 1859. Ambrose Family Collection.
One more Melvillian connection between van de Velde and Turner can be mentioned here. Between 1831 and 1844 Turner exhibited five paintings inspired by those with which van de Velde had depicted naval warfare between the British and the Dutch between 1645 and 1688 (four of Turner’s titles featured his “Admiral Von Tromp”). Three of those paintings were in private collections throughout Melville’s lifetime, but two he probably saw, and one of those he acquired for his own print collection.
Turner’s 1833 painting Van Tromp returning after the Battle of the Dogger Bank was part of the Turner Bequest in 1856 and presumably on display at the Turner Gallery when Melville visited in 1857 (see Bachrach, fig. 16, p. 50). Turner’s 1832 painting The Prince of Orange, William III, Embarked from Holland, and Landed at Torbay, November 4th, 1688 had been bought by Robert Vernon in 1832 and given to the Vernon Collection at the National Gallery in 1847 (fig. 6 below; Bachrach, fig. 18, p. 55).
Figure 6. J. M W. Turner. The Prince of Orange, William III, Embarked from Holland and Landed at Torbay, November 4th, 1688, after a Stormy Passage, oil on canvas, 1832. Gift of Robert Vernon to London’s National Gallery, 1847. Tate Gallery, London.
Melville may well have seen the above painting when he visited the Vernon Gallery in 1849—and then again when he visited the “Turner and Vernon Galleries” in 1857 (NN J 42-43, 128, 363). At some unknown date, he acquired W. Miller’s 1852 steel engraving of Turner’s Prince of Orange Landing at Torbay (fig. 7), further evidence of Melville’s interest in Turner’s interest in the world of van de Velde.
Figure 7. W. Miller after J. M. W. Turner. The Prince of Orange Landing at Torbay, steel engraving, 1852. From the Picture in the Vernon Gallery. Melville Memorial Room, Berkshire Athenaeum.
Our brief survey here of Turner’s relation to van de Velde in Melville’s books, pictures, and travels enriches our understanding of two poems Melville was writing or revising at the end of his life. This dynamic is most obvious in van de Velde’s 31-line reminiscence provoked by the word “smoke” that opens section 5 of “At the Hostelry.”
The specificity with which Melville’s van de Velde recalls the “bolts” that “spoke” from the broadsides of Van Tromp’s warship, the adventure of making “Art” inspired by De Ruyter's “cruises,” and the pathos with which he recalls the “ribbed shadow” from the broken “bones” of the old oaken warship “on Zealand’s strand”—each of these images is flooded with feeling. Melville's poetic tribute to the painter was enriched by the two prints after van de Velde he had collected, by the seven engravings of van de Velde and his paintings in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, and by the wide variety of original paintings by van de Velde Melville would have seen in four different galleries during his first visit to London in 1849, those followed by the concentrated cluster of van de Velde masterpieces at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam in 1857.
The pathos with which Melville’s poem deploys ekphrastic images condensing the long arc of van de Velde’s pictorial “glories engulfed in the past” is deepened by the fact that Melville was now himself, when revising the poem, “Some lion-heart old, /Austerely aside, on latter days cast.” He, too, was a “gray master-hand marine” whom time has passed by. But he, no less than van de Velde, in his love “for historic navies,” was leaving behind “a story now that storied made the seas” (NN BBO 158). That story for Melville was Billy Budd, Sailor, the short story whose manuscript, like that of “At the Hostelry,” he was still revising in the last year of his life.
During that last year, in May 1891, Melville published “Art,” a short, eleven-line poem in the collection he called Timoleon. Its main thesis is stated in lines 4 and 11: “What unlike things must meet and mate: / To wrestle with the angel—Art.” Melville’s “unlike things” included “Audacity—reverence” (NN PP 280). Among living artists in Melville’s lifetime, Turner had been notorious for the “audacity” with which he challenged the paintings of Claude Lorrain from his earliest landscapes and seascapes through until the day he died, leaving his extraordinary bequest of hundreds of paintings to the National Gallery on the condition that certain paintings of his be displayed next to those of Claude. Cosmo Monkhouse, in Melville’s copy of his 1879 monograph on Turner, accused young Turner of having unfairly “attacked” Claude by creating his own Liber Studiorum in response to Claude’s Liber Veritatis; Monkhouse interpreted Turner’s entire career as an attempt to become “the eclipser of Claude” (50, 61-63, 113). Melville, we can suppose, had a stronger sense of the “reverence” that inspired the “audacity” with which Turner responded to Claude. These are the two artists whose careers are most richly represented in Melville’s print collection, with fifteen prints after Claude (CAT 121-135) matched by more than thirty after Turner (CAT nos. to be assigned).
Turner’s lifelong engagement with van de Velde would have been for Melville another striking example of how “audacity” and “reverence” could “meet and mate.” What could be more reverent than Turner’s admission to friends that seeing a print after van de Velde “made me a painter?” What could be more audacious—and reverent—than the boldness—and fealty—with which young Turner’s Dutch Boats in a Gale rose to the challenge of matching van de Velde’s Ships in a Stormy Sea? The print Melville acquired of Dutch Boats in a Gale was one testament to that dynamic. Another was his copy of Monkhouse’s book on Turner. Severe as he was in castigating Turner as a would be “eclipser of Claude,” Monkhouse did honor Turner’s wish to emulate van de Velde, not only in the inspiration to become a painter, but in the specific achievement of Dutch Boats in a Gale.
Monkhouse quotes an extensive commentary in which John Burnet compares the virtues of Dutch Boats in a Gale with those of the van de Velde painting that inspired it. Burnet gives van de Velde “the preference as far as priority of composition is concerned; but Turner has had the boldness to tell the same story, clothing it with all the grandeur and sublimity of natural representation.” In short, the meeting and mating of “audacity—reverence.” In this case, even Monkhouse allows that “emulation with Turner, though it may have been a mark of jealousy, was always a token of respect” (18, 50-51).