Van de Velde, Vernet, and "The Lee Shore"

In this poignant image, one ship “crowds all sail off shore” while the figures in the foreground salvage what little they can from the ultimate irony of the perils of the lee shore in the words of Moby-Dick: “in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel would make her shudder through and through” (126).  Vernet heightens the domestic pathos of this shipwreck in the way he positions the black dog and the dying woman in white at the center of the shoreline surrounded by men who are still trying to salvage trunks, bundles, and dreams that have been lost in the storm. 

In 1818, when these prints of van de Velde’s lee-shore Storm and Vernet’s lee-shore Shipwreck appeared in Ottley’s four-volume edition of Engravings after the Most Noble the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery, Allan Melvill, Herman’s future father, was spending the months of May, June, and July in Scotland, London, and Paris. In Scotland, and then in London, he tried to ingratiate himself with living descendants of Scottish lords and earls from whom his own American ancestors had long been severed. In Paris, with capital provided largely by his father in Boston, he made arrangements to acquire sufficient French clothing and finery with which to establish what he hoped would be a lucrative import business in New York City (Parker, 9-10). One wonders if during this 1818 visit to London he visited the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery, saw the lee-shore paintings by van de Velde and Vernet in that collection, and acquired the engravings after those paintings by Fittler and Bryne that survive today as part of his son Herman’s print collection. 

Beginning in 1806, the Stafford Gallery had become the first major picture gallery in London to be open to the public (on Wednesday afternoons in May, June, and July).The prospectus for Ottley’s 1818 four-volume catalogue indicates that engravings after paintings the collection were available at three different prince levels: 35 pounds for prints (such as Herman’s copy of van de Velde’s Storm), 71 pounds for India Proofs, and 171 pounds for Colored and mounted prints (such as Herman’s copy of Vernet’s Shipwreck). Writing in 1823, a year before the creation of the London’s National Gallery, William Hazlitt called the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery “probably the most magnificent collection that this country can boast” (Humfrey 186-87). Whether or not Allan Melvill had visited that gallery himself, it is easy to imagine him acquiring each of these dramatic lee-shore scenes for personal display in his New York City home or as ornaments for his import business, at which he also appears to have sold prints and engravings (see my Melville and Turner, 9-11). 

The prints after van de Velde’s Storm and Vernet’s Shipwreck in Herman Melville’s print collection are quite similar in subject and style to the “oil paintings and rare old engravings” that the merchant father in Melville’s autographical novel Redburn had brought back from his own business trips to London and the Continent. Redburn recalls two “sea-pieces” his father displayed in the dining room. One featured “old-fashioned French men-of war with castles, like pagodas, on the bow and stern,” sailing “at a fearful angle,” with “white spray . . . about the bows like a snow-storm.” The other was a coastal scene with a “high French-like land in one corner, with a tumble-down gray lighthouse surmounting it.” The figures in the foreground of this painting, “in red caps, and their trousers legs rolled up,” were “hauling in a seine,” not salvaging the remnants of a wreck (NN R 6-7).  

Until learning that Herman’s two lee-shore prints from the Stafford Gallery had been available for purchase when his merchant father was in London in 1818, I had assumed that Herman himself had identified the print after Vernet by writing the artist’s name in the margin beneath the image. Now it seems possible that the elegant handwriting may have been that of his father. Whichever the case, Herman had interests in the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery beyond the two-lee shore prints that eventually entered his own collection. William Hazlitt had first praised that gallery’s “magnificent collection” in his essay on that collection in an 1823 issue of London Magazine. One year later the essay was republished in Hazlitt’s Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England. As Peter Humfrey has recently pointed out, these essays were “at the very center of what was still a brand-new literary and journalistic genre: that of writing on art collections.” Hazlitt’s essays were personal, idiosyncratic, and subjective. Unconcerned with “the received wisdom of academic teachings,” his primary goal was simply “to describe the feelings which [painters] naturally excite in the mind of the lover of art” (187-89). Melville was deeply drawn to Hazlitt’s range as a writer and his familiar style, especially in writing about art. He not only collected but annotated several of Hazlitt’s essay collections, beginning the 1845 copy of Table-Talk he inherited after the death of his brother Gansevoort in 1846 (Sealts no. 266a). 

When Herman Melville made his own first visit to the picture galleries of England in 1849, he carried a friend’s copy of Hazlitt’s 1824 Sketches with him. In 1871, about the time he was himself becoming a serious collector of prints, he acquired his own copy of Hazlitt’s Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England as part of the 1843 edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art edited by Hazlitt’s son Willliam (Sealts no. 263). Melville marked and annotated many of the essays in this volume. Some of his most revealing markings came at the beginning of the essay on “The Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery,” which opens with this stunning declaration: “Our intercourse with the dead is better than our intercourse with the living. There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things—books, pictures, and the face of nature” (underlines by Melville, who also made three marginal lines to the left of this statement; see MMO 263a, https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=70&PageID=24451).  

On the next page of the essay, Melville also made marginal lines along the complex sentence in which Hazlitt advised any reader, “whoever thou art, that dost seek happiness in thyself, independent of others, not subject to caprise, not mocked by insult, not snatched away by ruthless hands, over which Time has no power, and that Death alone cancels, seek it (if thou are wise) in books, in pictures, and the face of nature, for these alone we may count upon as friends for life!” (Criticisms on Art, 40-41). William Hazlitt died young, in 1830, at age 52. Melville was 52 when he acquired Hazlitt’s Criticisms of Art in 1871. Until his death twenty years later, books and picture were, indeed, among his most “pure and lasting” pleasures. 

Whenever he acquired it, and under whatever conditions, Herman Melville’s copy of the lee-shore print after van de Velde’s Storm would have been heartbreaking to him as a son. Equally so would have been his lee-shore print after Vernet’s Shipwreck. 

Van de Velde’s courageous ship holding its own against “the very winds that fain would blow her homeward” is an apt symbol of the young father who fathered child after child and moved his swelling family up Broadway from one more expensive house after another until the bubble burst so badly in 1830 that he had to move his whole family up the Hudson River under the protective wing of his wife’ s Gansevoort family in Albany, where he died in fever, and probable mania too, in 1832, leaving his wife and children to sort out the wreckage like Vernet’s grieving figures along the shore. 

In Vernet’s grieving Shipwreck scene, a new ship out at sea courageously challenges the lee-shore winds that “fain would blow her homeward,” an apt symbol for the courage of Herman Melville’s older brother Gansevoort in taking over the business interests of his deceased father in Albany and then establishing himself as a rising national political star in the early 1840s until suddenly dying as the Secretary to the American political legation in London in 1846. 

One of Gansevoort’s last acts in London was to help convince John Murray to publish Typee, Herman’s first novel, in 1846, launching the remarkable string of five subsequent novels by 1851, when Ishmael declares in Moby-Dick that “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as god—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” (107). 

Herman’s heroic challenge to the pressures of the lee-shore in Moby-Dick was immediately followed by the literary shipwreck of Pierre in 1852, ending his career as a novelist by the time he crossed the Atlantic on the voyage to the Mediterranean and the galleries of Europe in 1856-57 that opened up new worlds of artistry and feeling. By the time he acquired Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art in 1871, he was ready to make the most, as a poet and a print collector, of those books and pictures that did still provide pure and lasting pleasure.