Canot after van de Velde the Younger. A Brisk Gale

While Metsu, van Mieris, Dou, Steen, Netscher, ter Borch, and Vermeer were painting domestic scenes in Leiden, Amsterdam, and Delft in the 1660s, Willem van de Velde the Younger was painting marine scenes of the commercial shipping that enabled—and the naval warfare that protected—the prosperity of the Dutch Golden Age. Gabriel Metsu alluded to this interdependence when the young woman in A Woman Reading a Letter pulls back a curtain to reveal the left edge of a painting of a Dutch warship in a stormy sea (fig. 1). Metsu is thought to have completed this painting by 1666, the year of the Four Days’ Battle in the Second Anglo-Dutch War.  

That the marine painting seen within Metsu’s domestic scene is in the style of Willem van de Velde the Younger is evident in the print that is the subject of this entry, Melville’s copy of A Brisk Gale, etched and engraved by Pierre Charles Canot in 1765. Van de Velde’s original painting, now known as A Dutch Flagship Coming to Anchor Close to the Land in a Fresh Breeze (fig. 2), is thought to have been completed just before he and his father moved their studio from the Amsterdam to London in 1672. This painting combines two qualities of young van de Velde’s marine scenes that were already highly appreciated in the 1650s and 1660s: the accuracy of his depictions of ships, painted after drawings by his father; and his rendering of the color and motion of sea and sky as ships moved through them, inspired by his study with Simon de Vlieger (Robinson no. 300.1).

Herman Melville’s first immersion in the marine paintings of Willem van de Velde the Younger came during his visit to the picture galleries of England in November and December 1849. Hampton Court, the first gallery he visited, had more than a dozen van de Velde seascapes, many of them documenting sea battles between Dutch and English warships. Among the “gems” Melville saw at the Dulwich Gallery were four van de Velde marine scenes: three entitled A Calm, the other A Breeze at Sea. Melville would have seen two more van de Velde marine scenes entitled A Calm at the National Gallery, which he visited three times. Before sailing home to New York at the end of December Melville would have seen more van de Velde marine battle scenes among the “sea pieces & portraits of naval heroes” in the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital, where the National Gallery of Naval Art had been installed in 1824 (NN J 16, 20, 23, 24, 14, 16, 432; Hazlitt, Criticisms on Art, Appendices 1-3). In contrast to the print Melville acquired of A Brisk Gale, dominated by a massive Dutch Flagship, the painting of A Brisk Breeze at the Dulwich Gallery features trio of smaller domestic or commercial craft in the foreground as a warship approaches from out at sea (fig. 3). 

One expects that young Melville, on his first visit to the picture galleries of England in 1849, would have responded to the number and diversity of van de Velde’s marine scenes primarily though his own experience as a sailor. Now thirty years old, he had already sailed across the Atlantic and back as a crew member on a merchant ship in 1839, sailed the South Seas as a crew member on three different whale ships between 1841 and 1843, returned from the South Seas as an ordinary seaman on the battleship U. S. United States in 1844, and crossed the Atlantic as a passenger on the windblown packet ship that brought him to England in October 1849. All these experiences on a variety of vessels exposed to every combination of storm and calm on two different oceans would have prepared him well to appreciate the accuracy and variety of van de Velde’s painted marine scenes. Melville’s appreciation of van de Velde’s maritime artistry would have been further intensified by having published four maritime novels in the last four years, bringing with him the completed manuscript of his fifth, hoping to find a London publisher for White-Jacket. Melville as a sailor/novelist would have been interested not only in the nautical subjects of van de Velde's paintings, but in this artist's gift for representing ships at sea. 

Young Melville’s first exposure to van de Velde’s nautical artistry in the galleries of London in 1849 is of particular interest to us today because of the Dutch painter’s importance to Melville as a poet and print collector forty years later. The extended soliloquy Melville gives to the painter van de Velde to begin the fifth section of “At the Hostelry” (the poem about painters Melville was still revising at the time of his death) is the longest sustained meditation given to any Old Master painter in the poem. Before looking closely at van de Velde’s meditation, we will glance at some of the steps by which the seaman/novelist who would have seen original paintings by van de Velde for the first time in London in 1849 became the poet/print collector who so movingly honored that painter in the poem he was still revising forty years later. 

We don’t know when Herman Melville acquired his copy of J. P. Canot’s highly accomplished engraving of van de Velde’s A Brisk Gale published in London in 1765. Nor do we know when he acquired his copy of James Fittler’s highly dramatic engraving of van de Velde’s A Storm published in London in 1810 (the subject of our next catalog entry). The nautical subjects and publication dates of these two prints make it possible that young Herman might have inherited one or both of these prints some time after the death of Allan Melvill, his art-loving father, in 1832. Allan Melvill, like the fictional father in Melville’s Redburn (1849), was a New York City merchant who imported elegant domestic merchandise from France. He had crossed the Atlantic and seen the galleries of Paris and London in 1802-03 and again in 1818. We have every reason to believe that the nautical paintings and prints in the fictional family’s home (very much in van de Velde’s style) resembled those in Melville’s childhood home (NN R 6). We know that Canot’s 1765 engraving after van de Velde’s A Brisk Gale was important to Melville later in life because it was one of the few framed prints in his collection. That print also became important to his granddaughter Eleanor Melville Metcalf, the de facto custodian of his print collection in the early twentieth century. Here you see that print, still in Melville’s frame, in Eleanor Melville Metcalf’s Martha's Vineyard home, in a photograph for a 1929 New Bedford newspaper (fig. 4):

Although we don’t know when or how Melville acquired his copy of A Brisk Gale, we do know when he acquired some of the resources that enabled him to represent van de Velde (and other Dutch painters) so effectively in “At the Hostelry.” In May 1870 he acquired his own copy of the 1843 London edition of Hazlitt’s Criticisms of Art: and Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England (Sealts no. 263a). In December 1871 he acquired the 1854 London edition of The Works of Eminent Masters (Sealts no. 564, two volumes in one). We know that Melville had already become a serious print collector from the May 1869 letter he wrote to Elias Dexter, a New York printseller and framer, giving specific instructions on how to frame (and preserve the lettering from) Melville’s copy of a mezzotint depicting “The Healing of the Blind” (see our CAT 111). We know that Melville made good use of both Hazlitt and the Works volumes during the last twenty years of his life from the many markings and annotations he made in each, now available digitally on Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO 263a and 564). 

Acquiring in 1870 his own copy of Hazlitt’s Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England (in the volume edited by Hazlitt’s son in 1843) allowed Melville to actively revisit many of the galleries he had himself visited, and written journal entries about, twenty years earlier. As he read Hazlitt’s brilliant essays (first published in 1824) about paintings Melville had himself seen at Hampton Court, Dulwich Gallery, Windsor Castle, and the National Gallery, his markings and annotations were responding to Hazlitt’s words as well as to the paintings that had inspired them. Melville was actively learning to be an art critic in addition to being reader of books, a collector of prints, and the author of novels and poems. This 1843 edition also gave Melville something more. This edition of Criticisms on Art had appendices by Hazlitt’s son listing every work in nearly every gallery his father had written about. Appendix 1 listed 182 paintings in the Angerstein Gallery that had become the foundation for the National Gallery. Appendices 2, 3, and 4 listed 355 paintings at the Dulwich Gallery, 1008 paintings at Hampton Court, and 208 paintings at Windsor Castle. As Melville continued to collect prints and write poetry, these lists would have been very handy as supplements to his visual memory, his reading of Hazlitt, and the journal entries he had made at these galleries in 1849. 

The copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 included much more about Willem van de Velde specifically. The six-page double-columned essay begins with a composite portrait of van de Velde the Younger wetting his brush on a palette surrounded by a sail, a trident, allegorical figures, and the sketch of a ship stranded on a shore below a lighthouse. Below on the same page is a small, square engraved image of a boat with sails near the shore, reflected on a glassy sea (fig. 5). These are the two of seven engravings that illustrate this essay, each of the others depicting a van de Velde seascape filling at least half a page. 

The text of this essay is impressive. In addition to summarizing young van de Velde’s life and career in the Netherlands before the move to England in 1672 and after that move, the essay gives due attention to his active collaboration with his father (“the Elder”) in the studios they shared in each country. The reader gets a good sense of the degree to which many of the paintings the Younger made (especially during the Anglo-Dutch naval battles in 1652-54 and 1665-67) depended on the grisaille drawings of the ships his father had made, often in the midst of battle. This text is also attentive to the range and delicacy of the paintings the younger van de Velde made from his own observations of every kind of shipping he had himself seen from the shoreline and sometimes out at sea. Its opening paragraph touches on many of the qualities that make the engraving Melville acquired of A Brisk Gale such a pleasure to the eye. Because Willem van de Velde “has painted the sea con amore,” the English and the Dutch, “two nations of sailors, passionately fond of the sea," consider him to be 

"the greatest painter of sea pieces that ever appeared down to his time. And, in truth, no one has more closely observed the agitation of the waves, their breaking or their repose; no one knew better the gait and habits of sailors, the rigging and working of ships, the variety of their build, their picturesque appearance when grouped by chance, and their imposing appearance when isolated between sky and water. . . . No one has ever felt so deeply the deep calm of the ocean, nor expressed so well the inexpressible emotions inspired by the sight of a fading horizon—the image of infinity.” (Works 1:49)

When these words were published in 1854, Melville’s nautical novels, perhaps more than those of any living author, embodied the very qualities for which van de Velde is here celebrated. 

This Works essay concludes with a useful overview of the locations of van de Velde paintings in public and private galleries in England and on the Continent. Of the 262 known paintings, “seven-eights” were in “private collections in England.” Of the public collections in England, the essay mentions only eight van de Veldes at Hampton Court and four at the Dulwich Gallery. Among the public galleries on the Continent, there were one or two van de Veldes in Munich, at the Hague, and at the Louvre, but the only substantial collection was at the “Picture Gallery” in Amsterdam (then the Trippenhuis), which Melville visited in 1857. The six van de Veldes in that collection included two calm marine scenes, one with a stormy ocean, one view of Amsterdam, and two celebrated battle scenes, the most famous of which depicted “the capture of the English vessel, ‘the Royal Prince’” (1:54). The capture took place on June 13, 1666, the third day of the Four Days’ Anglo/Dutch War. Van de Velde the Younger is thought to have completed The Capture of the Royal Prince (fig. 7) in 1670.

The English flagship The Royal Prince had been captured by the Dutch lieutenant-admiral-general Cornelis Tromp after being driven aground on a sandbank. On the left side of the painting, the English sailors are being transferred to Tromp’s ship the Gouda as The Royal Prince awaits its fate. Tromp had hoped to tow the captured English ship back to the Netherlands in triumph, but he was overruled by Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, who commanded The Royal Prince to be burned (cited Robinson if he gives it). The burning of that ship, on June 3, 1666, was the subject of a painting by Adriaen van Diest which Melville had probably seen during his visit to the Painted Hall and the Naval Maritime Museum at Greenwich in 1849 (NN J 23). 

The six van de Velde marine paintings that Melville could have seen at the “Picture Gallery” in Amsterdam on April 24, 1857 were probably his last chance to see so many original van de Veldes on a single day. The Metropolitan Museum in New York does not seem to have acquired its first original painting by van de Velde the Younger until early in the twentieth century.