R. Wallis after Frans van Mieris. The Writing-Master
CAT 206. R. Wallis after Frans van Mieris. The Writing-Master. From the Picture in the Dresden Gallery. Published in S. C. Hall’s Gems of European Art. London: George Virtue, 1846. Reprinted in The Art Journal (London), 1880. Berkshire Athenaeum, Melville Memorial Room.
Melville’s copy of The Writing-Master by Frans van Mieris was engraved by R. Wallis for Gems of European Art in London in 1846. The original painting by van Mieris, currently known as Old Man Sharpening his Pen, dates from the earliest period of the young painter’s apprenticeship with Dou in Leiden (fig. 1). Buvelot dates the painting 1650-55 and reproduces it alongside van Mieris’s impressive charcoal sketch for the painting (cat. nos. 1 & 2).
Figure 1. Frans van Mieris. Old Man Sharpening his Pen, oil on oak wood, c. 1650-55. Old Masters Picture Gallery, Dresden State Museum.
This painting resembles that of Dou in subject as well as style. Dou had painted an Old Man Sharpening his Pen fifteen years earlier. Dou had also made use of an open book, a globe, and an intently concentrating sitting figure in his Painter in his Studio in 1648 (Naumann, figs. 20, 22). Naumann lists the 1880 Wallis reproduction in the Art-Journal among four engravings after the painting in the nineteenth century, but he does not record the earlier publication of that print in Gems of European Art in 1846 (pp. 8-9).
The 1846 letterpress for Gems of European Art emphasized the biographical elements of van Mieris’ life—his apprenticeship to Gerard Dou, the patronage bestowed by Silvius and the Archdukes of Austria and Tuscany, and his notorious drinking bouts with Jan Steen. His paintings are “remarkable in spirit” and even more polished than those of Dou, but there is “a certain coldness in his works . . . resulting from this excessive care.” The single sentence given to The Writing-Master declares only that this painting is “one of the most cherished ‘gems’ of the Dresden Gallery” (119-20).
Melville had a much richer account of both the life and works of van Mieris in the essay on that master in The Works of Eminent Masters. Here the familiar tale of van Mieris falling into a sewer on the way home from a drinking bout with Jan Steen is preceded the account of “a curious contradiction in character” involving his son John Mieris. The elder van Mieris had “entrusted” the boy’s artistic education to his colleague Gerard de Lairaisse, a highly admired protégé of Rembrandt. Lairesse was “grave and solemn in his looks,” but he was “a bit of a libertine in his manners, and for this reason Mieris removed his son from his care, lest his example should corrupt the youth’s morals” (1: 131).
The engraving Melville knew as The Writing-Master in his print from Gems of European Art was one of nine engravings after van Mieris in his personal copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, where it is called The Philosopher (figure 2).
Figure 2. The Philosopher. From a Painting by Mieris in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
By calling this engraving The Philosopher, not The Writing-Master, the commentary in Works suggests a higher intellectual range in the figure seated at the table. The commentator also declares that in this painting “Mieris gives evidence of a much higher kind of talent than he has displayed in his other works.” In this case the “elaboration of details” is subordinate to the power of expression. “The main interest in the piece is centered in the principal figure. The old man’s head is a fine expression of the idea of calm clear-headedness, of deep thought, and of a life far removed from the petty passions, tumult, and turmoil of the world without” (1: 133-34). A. H. Payne, who engraved the same painting as The Scholar in Payne’s Royal Dresden Gallery in 1845, called similar attention to “the noble and intellectual expression” of the scholar we see “in the act of mending the pen with which he has been noting down his observations or opinions” (2: 131-32).
In 1880, when Wallis’ engraving entitled The Writing Master was reprinted in London’s Art-Journal (this time without a hyphen), the anonymous commentary attended to the visual image itself. The artist’s treatment of the “single figure” framed by “an arched casement . . . is very effective; the light, it will be seen, does not enter the apartment through the open archway, but through a window on the left, which is only made apparent by its illuminating the various objects on which it falls. . . . The natural attitude of the man, the modeling of the head and hands, the easy flow of the lines in the arrangement of his costume, are points of excellence which commend themselves to all who examine the work carefully” (“The Writing Master,” 356).
Melville’s engraving of The Writing-Master shows the influence of Dou not only in the subject of An Old Man Sharpening his Pen but in van Mieris’ use of the window “niche” style that Dou had pioneered. In the subtle light effects by which he depicts a man writing, van Mieris is also showing the influence of Gabriel Metsu—a Leiden contemporary also collected by Melville (Sluijter, 487; see our CAT 208). Naumann and Buvelot both stress the interdependency of van Mieris, Metsu, and van Ostade in both subject and technique throughout the 1650s and 1660s (Naumann, 39-44, Buvelot 15), weakening the lines of demarcation by which a writer like Gower would separate them.
One of Melville’s few annotations in The Figure Painters of Holland comes on the page on which Lord Gower subjects ter Borch’s famous painting The Satin Gown to a critique he immediately extends to the genre scenes of “the Mierises and the Metsus” as well. In response to the statement that ter Borch’s painting shows nothing more than “his marvellous power of rendering the quality and texture of a white satin gown on a graceful female form” (15), Melville writes in the margin that “Lord R. G. in this criticism stamps himself hardly as a profound intelligence” (Cowen 5: 247-48).
Apart from its art-historical value to Melville as an example of Dutch genre painting, Wallis’s engraving of The Writing-Master was also a striking embodiment of the genre to which Melville himself belonged as a person—the philosopher, the scholar, the man who writes. Both the high forehead and fine-grained beard of van Mieris’s cerebral sitter resemble those of Herman Melville in Joseph Eaton’s portrait of 1870, one year before Melville acquired his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters (fig. 3).
Figure 3. J. O. Eaton. Portrait of Herman Melville, oil on canvas, 1870. Houghton Library, Harvard University. [Emily: crop out color bar on left]
Melville does not mention van Mieris himself in “At the Hostelry.” He may well have been thinking of him, however, when alluding to Jan Steen as “Jan who kept the Leyden tavern” (NN BBO 330). We have already seen that van Mieris’s habitual and excessive drinking in Steen’s tavern was mentioned in the commentary that accompanied The Writing-Master when Melville’s print was published in Gems of European Art and again by The Art Journal in 1880. We have not yet noted that the engraving after the same painting that was published in Melville’s 1854 copy of Works was preceded by four extensive paragraphs about the drinking with Steen that led to the fall into the sewer from which van Mieris was rescued by a cobbler. On the page that followed the engraving, Melville marked a passage about the excessive debts for which van Mieris was “several times put in prison” (1: 131-34, MMO 564.1.134, https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=59&PageID=18512).
Similarly, when Melville has Gerard Dou confess to his love of “well scoured copper sauce-pans” as picturesque visual objects in “At the Hostelry” (NN BBO 325), Melville may possibly be thinking of the shallow copper dish that Dou’s star student Frans van Mieris conspicuously depicts on the window ledge in The Writing-Master. The commentary that accompanied the Wallis engraving in The Art-Journal in 1880 called attention to the “the copper-lined hand dish, half-filled with water” (p. 356) even though its black and white engraving could not convey the copper color conveyed so richly in the original painting (our figure 1 above). Melville would have access to the copper color of such dishes in the painting of A Flemish Kitchen by Teniers that had been acquired by the New York Metropolitan Museum in 1874 was still on display in Old Eastern Gallery Y from November 1890 until Melville’s death in September 1891 (fig. 4 below). The function of the “copper-lined” dish in A Flemish Kitchen was not to wash men’s hands in water but to catch the blood dripping from the slaughtered ox hanging directly above it, as seen by the care with which a man is carrying another “copper-lined” dish already “half-filled” with blood quickly out the door to the left of the ox. One “well scoured” copper “pan” such as Melville alludes to in “At the Hostelry” gleams to the left of the dog in the foreground of A Flemish Kitchen.
Figure 4. Workshop of David Teniers the Younger. Interior of a Farmhouse with a Slaughtered Ox, oil on canvas, c. 1650s. Acquired by Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1874. Exhibited as A Flemish Kitchen in Old Eastern Gallery Y, November 1890 – November 1891.
The Metropolitan Museum does not appear to have acquired any paintings by Frans van Mieris by the time Melville died in 1891. But one painting by his son Willem van Mieris (1662-1747) was part of the Original Purchase that had established the museum in 1871. One wonders if its subject, The Tippler, was influenced to any degree by observing his father, who died in 1681, when the boy was in his late teens (fig. 5). Frans van Mieris, in addition to drinking, loved to paint himself in elaborate costumes.
Figure 5. Willem van Mieris, The Tippler, oil on cradled panel, date unknown. Acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Original Purchase, 1871. Deaccessioned and auctioned at Parke-Burnet Galleries, 1956; auctioned by Bourgeault-Horan Antiquarians, 2015.
The Tippler does not appear to have been exhibited very often after being acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1871. It was exhibited in the inaugural exhibition in 1872 (Catalogue of the Pictures, no. 129, p. 51), but I have not seen it listed in any of the Hand-Books that the Museum published between Melville’s retirement from the New York Custom House in 1885 and his death in 1891. When the painting was finally deaccessioned and sold at Parke-Burnet Galleries, New York, in 1956, it brought only $325 (Baetjer 2004, Appendix 1, no. 129, p. 238). Its listed value had risen to $1080 when reoffered by Northwest Auctions in 2015 (Gammon, Appendix 5, no. 129, p. 353).
Melville would have had relatively little potential access to The Tippler on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum, but he did have access to information about Willem van Mieris the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters he acquired in 1871. In the essay on Frans van Mieris, immediately below the passage Melville marked about that painter having been sent to prison for excessive debt, and immediately across from the highly appreciative paragraph about the engraving of The Philosopher on the next page, Melville would have read that the painter’s son Willem van Mieris was himself a painter who “imitated his manner with considerable ability, and maintained the celebrity of the name” (1:134; fig. 5).
Figure 6. Melville’s marginal mark about Frans van Mieris directly above the passage about his sons John and William and across from the paragraph about the father’s painting of The Philosopher, “which we have engraved” (in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters acquired in 1871).