Engraving after G. Metzu. Der Wildprethändler

The two engravings Melville acquired after paintings by Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) show how Metsu at once consolidated and transcended the Leiden school as exemplified by Dou and van Mieris. Together, Der Wildprethändler and The Letter Writer illustrate the “two contemporary strains in Dutch painting” that Metsu was mastering simultaneously in the early 1660s: “on the one hand, the Leiden school, with its tight and polished touch, window niches, and anecdotes of the kitchen and market place; and on the other, the interest in spatial clarity which found its climax in the Delft school of the Sixties” (Robinson 51). 

Although most of Metsu’s extant works are undated, many of the most characteristic paintings from his early years in Leiden were market scenes of sellers of fish and poultry whose subject and style derived directly from Dou. These subjects retained a strong hold on Metsu even after he moved to Amsterdam in 1657, as indicated by the 1662 painting An Old Man Selling Poultry and Game from which Der Wildprethändler was engraved (fig. 1).  

Melville’s copy of Der Wildprethändler is remarkable for the detail with which Metsu has rendered the old man (and every detail of the cock in his hand), the young woman (and every detail of her white ruffled sleeves and elegantly striped hem), and the attitudes of the attentive dog and the averted turkey. The dead bodies of the bird and the hare in the left foreground are rendered as minutely as the living bird in the cage and the butterfly on the plant to the right of the lady. Another engraving after the same painting was published as A Dealer in Game in Payne’s Royal Dresden Gallery, in London and Leipzig, in 1845.

Payne's commentary shows high appreciation for Metsu’s gift for visual detail. The “rich and carefully arranged dress” of the young woman "contrasts admirably with the negligence" in the dress of the old man as she appears to be bargaining for a white cock which he holds in his hands. The scarlet jacket trimmed with white fur, the yellow petticoat with its stripes of black velvet, the transparent apron edged with lace, the ear-rings of pearl, and the golden ornaments in the hair and on the purse suspended from the arm, seem to indicate that the young beauty is the daughter of some wealthy citizen.” Nothing could be “more exquisitely true to nature than the plumage of the various birds represented in this picture, and the same may be said of the execution of the dead hare which is lying on the ground.” Yet, even “with all this attention to detail, the general effect of the picture is broad and natural, and the immense labour which has been bestowed upon it, is only visible upon close inspection” (2: 53). 

Metsu’s companion market scene, Young Woman Selling Poultry, was also painted in 1662 (fig. 2) Today they remain together in the Dresden State Gallery, as they were in Melville’s day (Gower, p. 108; Robinson, figs. 128, 129; Waiboer, cat. 13, 14, figs. 54, 55). 

Gower is very attentive to Metsu’s market scenes in Melville’s copy of The Figure Painters of Holland. He reproduces The Vegetable Market at Amsterdam as his one illustration of Metsu’s art (fig. 3; facing p. 59).  

The above was one of the largest and best-known market scenes painted by Metsu after his move to Amsterdam. Its mixture of buyers and sellers, baskets and buckets, and animals and vegetables is very much in the spirit of plenitude in which Melville depicts the Dutch market in “At the Hostelry.” After Dou celebrates the “Delf ware olden” on the “kitchen-dresser,” and the “sauce-pans—golden” gleaming “on the hearth,” he completes the “picturesque" picture by itemizing these items “flung” on the “oak dresser” direct from “the evening-market”:  

Pigeons and prawns, bunched carrots bright,   

Grilled fish, clean radish red and white,  

And greens and cauliflowers, and things  

The good wife’s good provider brings. (NN BBO 159)  

In addition to seeing the engraving after Metsu’s Vegetable Market at Amsterdam in his copy of Gower’s book from 1880, young Melville may well have seen the original painting among the “heaps of treasures of all sorts” during his visit to the Louvre on November 30, 1849 (NN J 31). Gower considers the Vegetable Market at Amsterdam (fig. 4) to be “the best” of the eight Metsu paintings in the collection at the Louvre (59, 109).   

Gower, in addition to reproducing the painting of the Amsterdam market, praises the ease with which Metsu enables the viewer “to visit the busy market-place, and stroll along the sides of the canal alive with boats and barges; the heavy gables of the red-brick houses on the other side throwing their bright reflections in the water below” (59). Melville saw such features of the city with his own eyes after his visit to the “Picture Gallery” (now the Rijksmuseum) on April 24, 1857. At the museum, he took note Paul Potter’s The Bear, a Hals double portrait, and Rembrandt’s Night Watch and The Syndics in addition to “convivial scenes” by Teniers, Breughel, and others. Out in the open air, the “long lines” of house fronts reminded him of “old fashioned frontispieces in old folios & old quartos.” As he wandered along the “canals & drawbridges” on the way to “the Port,” he was stuck by the “red tiles of houses” and “greasy looking old fellows” who reminded him of Teniers (NN J 127, 523).  

Gower concluded his commentary on The Vegetable Market at Amsterdam by declaring that Metsu and other “magicians of the palette and the brush take us back two centuries and more, and show us the way these people lived in that little land reclaimed from the sea” (58). The prints and engravings after Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings from the 1650s and 1660s that Melville acquired in the 1870s and 1880s took him back to the social conditions and physical environs from which his Albany ancestor Harmen Harmense van Gansevoort had emigrated in the late 1650s. Supplemented by the Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings being acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art during those same decades, these prints and illustrated books in his own home enabled Melville to enliven his colloquy among Old Master painters in “At the Hostelry” with knowing allusions to Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Hals, Teniers, Brouwer, Steen, Dou, and others to be discussed later in this chapter.

Gower admired Metsu’s outdoor market scenes far more than his sophisticated depiction of indoor scenes. Gower’s denigration of both Metsu and van Mieris as “tea-tray” painters is characteristic of the sharp decline in the reputation of each toward the end of the nineteenth century (26). Franklin Robinson’s monograph on Metsu in 1974 resurrected Metsu’s modern reputation in the way Naumann was to do for van Mieris in 1981. Robinson sees The Old Man Selling Poultry and Game and its female pendant as the end point of the fastidious attention to surface detail that Dou and van Mieris had perfected in their own treatment of market scenes. He notes that the dead tree is a direct borrowing from Dou and suggests that the inexpressive face of the old man derives from van Mieris’s treatment of similar figures. Robinson further suggests that nothing in the highly finished Leiden style could surpass Metsu’s rendering of the turkey’s head or the inert bodies of the bird and the hare beneath it. Even so, Metsu does inject much of his own sensibility into this work, especially in the dramatic tension between the old man and the young woman, and in the comparatively free handling of the buildings and canal to the right (53).  

One dramatic example of the revival of Metsu’s reputation late in the twentieth-century is the cover illustration of the June 2001 issue of The Art Bulletin: a close-up detail of Metsu’s 1662 poulterer holding his cock up to the young lady (fig. 5). Elizabeth Alice Honig in her cover essay “Desire and Domestic Economy” admits that “sometimes a bird is just a bird.” But not in this case. In this painting Metsu “transfigures” a commonplace shopping scene “into an aesthetic moment that is both breathtakingly beautiful and perfectly ‘realistic.'” His painting “necessitates” that one see the sexual innuendo along with the economic transaction, thereby dramatizing in an unforgettable way what Honig sees as a central issue in the seventeenth-century Dutch market economy: that “women’s desire may be erotic, or economic, or both" (294).   

Honig ends her extensive exploration of this theme by reproducing a photograph of Jan Steen’s Poultry Seller, a painting whose current location is unknown. Steen’s old man, like Metsu’s, extends his own bird to a well-dressed young woman (fig. 6). Each painting dramatizes “both women’s economic behavior and their physical attractiveness” (294, 311-12).  

 Linda Stone-Ferrier in 2010 challenged Honig’s erotic emphasis in her essay on “Gabriel Metsu’s Street Scenes” in the catalog for the influential exhibition of Metsu paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Rijksmuseum, and the National Gallery in Washington. Stone-Ferrier effectively associates this and other Metsu market scenes with the physical spaces and communal ethos of Amsterdam’s self-regulating neighborhoods, including the one in which Metsu himself lived, steps away from the market on the Prinsengeracht (see the canal in the background of the market transaction in Melville’s print). Stone-Ferrier argues that the communal ethos of the neighborhood, combined with the care and dignity with which Metsu depicts the young lady herself, militates against an overheated erotic interpretation (184-94).  

Might Melville himself have seen any erotic edge in his engraving after Metsu’s Old Man Selling Poultry and Game? The answer is perhaps suggested by the exchange he stages between Gerard Dou and Peter Paul Rubens in “At the Holstelry.” After Dou celebrates the “picturesqueness” of the fresh provisions that have been “flung” on the “oak buffet” of the “good wife” after a trip to the “evening-market,” he expresses equal pleasure in the image of “a Phillis pleasant / Plucking a delicate fat pheasant” for the evening feast. In response to which Sir Peter Paul translates Dou’s Phillis into his own kind of erotic fantasy: “Make her Venus, man, / Peachy and plump; and for the pheasant, / No fowl but will prove aquiescent / Promoted into Venus’s swan” (325-26). Metsu has in this case pictured neither the plucking Phillis nor the peachy Venus but instead the “good wife” at the market itself. 

Gabriel Metsu was born in 1629, fifteen years after Gerard Dou, whose market scenes had influenced Metsu during his younger days in Leiden. In the early 1660s, however, Metsu’s market scenes in Amsterdam were to influence those of Dou, as seen in Dou’s 1663 painting of a young woman at a window with a golden bowl of apples and a cock pheasant straight from the market (fig. 7).