Burnet after Metsu. The Letter Writer

Just as Melville’s German-language print of Der Wildprethändler represents Metsu’s consolidation of the highly finished, anecdotal Leiden school of Dou, van Mieris, and Steen, so does his English-language print of The Letter Writer demonstrate Metzu’s simultaneous assimilation of the Delft school epitomized by Johannes Vermeer. The degree to which Metsu assimilated the spirit and aesthetic of Vermeer played a major role in Franklin Robinson’s successful re-elevation Metsu’s reputation in 1974. A Man Writing a Letter (fig. 1) is not only the Metsu painting “most deeply influenced by the Delft school”; it is “one of the high points of Dutch genre painting” (59-60; fig. 1).

Robinson relates this painting to Vermeer for its “clear definition of space” and its “strong emphasis on the back wall, fully lighted and light in color.” This combines with the “pattern of tiles” in the floor, the "lush Turkish carpet" over the table, and “the use of larger, simple, geometrical shapes to give a sense of unity to the work as a whole.” Here Metsu has created “a perfect, closed world, in which everything is calculated, nothing is out of place” (59-60).

Melville’s copy of The Letter Writer was engraved by John Burnet and published by William Miller in London with a date of 1812 (even though it is included in The British Gallery of Engraving published by Miller in 1807). The commentary that accompanied the engraving in The British Gallery noted with great pride that the original painting, now “in the possession of Mr. Henry Philip Hope,” had been in the hands of this British family “for a great number of years.” That commentary declared that Dou and van Mieris are the masters “whose style [Metsu] most admired . . . yet there is very considerable variation from their manner and touch. . . . The present is an admirable specimen of this master, and certainly not to be excelled by any other in this country. It is in most perfect harmony, and there is a delicacy and feeling, which few pictures in this class possess.” This painting “portrays all the earnestness, and even anxiety, of a lover writing to his mistress; and such is the traditional subject of the picture, though we have simply called it ‘The Letter Writer.’ Every part of the composition is most carefully and beautifully executed. All the accompaniments, the floor, the wall, the carpet over the table, the inkstand, the globe, the landscape and the frame, unite most happily, and form a pleasing whole” (n.p.). This commentary in the early 19^th-century anticipates Robinson’s high praise of “the balance and purity—the simplicity, directness, openness, and orderliness” when resurrecting Metsu’s reputation a century and a half later (61).

Melville’s copy of Gower’s 1880 book on The Figure Painters of Holland does not mention The Letter Writer either in its chapter on Metsu or in its list of Metsu paintings in English collections (60, 108-9). An engraving after that painting is, however, a central feature of a tribute to Metsu published in London’s Art-Journal in 1853.  After locating “Metsu’s celebrated picture The Letter Writer" in “the fine collection of Mr. Hope of London,” and celebrating Metsu’s depiction of the “young gentleman in a black silk dress with a broad white collar round his neck,” the commentator mentions that “this picture has been engraved by Mr. John Burnet, who refers to it in one of his published works on art as an admirable example of skillful composition, and of effective arrangement of chiar’-oscuro.” In contrast to Gower thirty years later, the commentator for The Art-Journal has a fine eye for the “wonderful execution” with which Metsu can treat what some would see as a trivial subject: “None of his rivals in the same class of Art excelled him in his effective management of light and shade, in accuracy of drawing, and in chasteness and harmony of color” (“Gabriel Metsu,” 218-20).

John Burnet (1784-1868), in addition to being an artist and engraver, was a prolific writer on art. Melville, in addition to owning Burnet’s engraving of Metsu’s Letter Writer, would have read his praise of the painting’s chiaroscuro when consulting Burnet’s A Treatise on Painting (Sealts no. 89). Moreover, Melville had a fine account of Metsu’s art in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, part of which he marked in the margins. In a section praising Metsu as a pictorial historian documenting the extraordinary variety of items which “the ships of his country” brought from the oceans of the world, Melville marks the passage in which “the ices of the Pole have furnished him with those splendid furs, to border the velvet mantle which his wife or eldest daughter is proud to wear, even in the warmest apartment of the house” (see fig. 2).

Melville extends his mark to the passage in which “the birds, the insects, the shells, and the minerals of the remotest lands, fill his cabinets, exquisitely arranged under covers of glass; and, protected in the same way, the rarest plants, the most delicate Persian lilies, the sumptuous tulips, flourish and are cultivated under his inspection.” Melville’s mark becomes even wider along the declaration that the furniture in Metsu’s pictorial world, “wrought with extreme taste, and preserved with the utmost care, suffers no changes from the caprice of fashion, but is transmitted from father to son, one generation after another.” A few lines later Melville underlines the word “tapestries” in a description of those “highly variegated” fabrics that “modulate and harmonize with the tone of the whole interior” when the morning or evening light “falls across them” (1: 366).

One of the most conspicuous “tapestries” that harmonizes a whole interior in Melville’s print collection is the sumptuous fabric that covers the table on which the elegant young man is writing the letter in Burnet’s engraving of Metsu’s The Letter Writer. Melville’s copy of this black-and-white engraving cannot capture the rich colors of this fabric in Metsu’s original painting (fig. 1), but it does convey the variegated pattern of its design, especially where the light from the window “falls” directly upon it. This is the "carpet over the table" that harmonizes with other visible elements (“the floor, the wall, the inkstand, the globe, the landscape and the frame”) to “unite most happily, and form a pleasing whole,” in the letterpress that accompanies Burnet's 1812 engraving, the "lush Turkish carpet" admired in the painting itself by Robinson in 1974.

Because of their Near Eastern origins and Ottomon designs, such tapestried fabrics covering elegant tables in wealthy Dutch homes in the mid-17^th century were often called Turkish rugs or Anatolian carpets. Pierre Galafassi in his essay on “Rugs in Paintings of the Dutch Golden Age” identifies three different categories of Turkish rugs whose designs resemble that of the “highly variegated tapestry” covering the writing desk in Melville’s engraved copy of Metsu’s The Letter Writer. A similar design is seen in the Turkish rug that covers the writing table in Melville’s engraving after van Mieris’s Writing-Master (CAT 206).

From the outdoor window niche that van Mieris adapted from Dou in The Writing Master, to the indoor window scene that Metsu adapted from Vermeer in The Letter Writer, Melville’s contrasting engravings of a thinking man at a tapestried writing desk express, as fully as any images could, both the similarities and differences in the art of these two contemporary masters from Leiden.