Turkish-Rugged Tables and Waters

The globe seen through the glass near the face of the elegant young man writing a letter on a table covered with a luxurious Turkish rug in Melville’s engraving after Metsu’s The Letter Writer suggests the degree to which the prosperity and optimism of life in Amsterdam in the 1660s was dependent upon the power of this small nation’s shipping empire to import goods and materials from around the world. Dated 1812, Melville’s copy of Burnet’s engraving after Metsu is one print that he might possibly have inherited from his father Allan, the young importer of interior furnishings from Europe who had made an extended business trip to Paris and London in 1818, the year before Herman was born.

Whenever he acquired it, Metzu’s The Letter Writer would have reminded Herman of the elegance with which his father had furnished the family home in New York City in the 1820s. We know this from Redburn, Melville’s most autobiographical novel, published in 1849. Redburn’s father, like Melville’s own, imported valuable furnishings from Europe for his family as well as his customers. Redburn recalls “several pieces of furniture in the house, which had been brought from Europe.” The dining room featured “several oil paintings and rare old engravings of sea-pieces of my father’s, which he had himself bought in Paris.” The home also featured “two large French portfolios of colored prints” which Redburn and his siblings would “gaze at . . . with never-failing delight” (NN R 6). 

Whether inherited from his father, or acquired by Melville himself later in life as a conscious addition to his own print collection, Burnet’s engraving after Metsu’s worldly Letter Writer would have poignantly reminded Herman not only of the enterprising young father who had imported elegant interior furnishings and high cultural ambitions from Europe but of the staggering financial losses that had ruined Allan Melvill’s import business in the late 1820s, causing him to move his large family to Albany in 1830 under the protection of his wife Maria Gansevoort's family, whose earliest ancestor had arrived from the Netherlands in the late 1650s. Allan Melvill died suddenly in 1832, when young Herman was only eleven, “blighting” his young life with the kind of trauma he ascribes to young Redburn in his novel (NN R 11; Parker 1:14-19). 

Young Melville temporarily escaped the sudden impoverishment of the now fatherless family as a teenager in Albany by sailing to Liverpool as a merchant sailor in 1839. Still without prospects on land, Herman embarked on a three-year voyage as a whaler to the Pacific Ocean in 1841. After returning from the South Seas in 1844, he published four novels successful enough for him to sail to England in October 1849 in search of a London publisher for White-Jacket, his fifth novel. That process took longer than expected, but this allowed him to immerse himself for the first time in original paintings by European Old Master artists such as his father had last seen in 1818.

After visiting the principal picture galleries of London, young Melville crossed the English Channel to see the Louvre and Versailles. The “heaps of treasures of all sorts” he saw at the Louvre included eight paintings by Metsu that are listed in Melville’s copy of Gower. One of those, A Woman holding a Glass and a Jug, featured a Turkish rug similar to those Metsu had depicted in The Letter Writer and many of his other paintings (fig. 6 below). This painting is identified as The Dutch Woman in Gower (p. 109). It dates from 1655-57, about the time Melville’s Gansevoort ancestor Harmen Harmense left the Netherlands to begin a new life in Albany.

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Figure 6. Gabriel Metsu. A Woman holding a Glass and a Jug, oil on panel, c. 1655-57. Acquired by the Louvre, Paris, 1794. 

Having entered the Louvre in 1794, this painting may have been seen by young Allan Melvill, Herman’s future father, when staying in Paris during his first visit to Europe in 1802-03. Allan would have been even more likely to notice this painting during his residence in Paris in 1818 when he was preparing to establish himself as an importer of elegant home furnishings at New York City. By then, Allan would certainly have had an eye for the kind of Turkish rugs that were conspicuous features of many elegant Dutch interiors painted by Metsu and his contemporaries in the 1660s.  

If Allan’s son Herman saw this painting at the Louvre in 1849, he would have entered into the aesthetic of his father’s import business, as well as the history of his mother’s Gansevoort ancestors, in a new way. He would also have seen in full color a Metsu painting of a Turkish rug similar to the one in Burnet’s 1812 black and white engraving of The Letter Writer. Melville would also have seen the painting of a Turkish rug that perhaps helps to explain his use of one of the most improbable metaphors that occurs anywhere in Moby-Dick, the novel he began to write immediately after returning to his own young family in New York City. When the sailors of the Pequod encounter Moby Dick for the first time in chapter 133, “the glistening white shadow” of the whale’s “broad, milky forehead” reaches “far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters” (NN MD 548; italics mine).

Whatever may have been the specific inspiration for the surprising image of “the soft Turkish-rugged waters” in Moby-Dick, Melville is certain to have noticed any Turkish rugs that are prominent in those Dutch paintings that he did encounter after publishing Moby-Dick in 1851. We know that he did see at least one such painting after arriving in Amsterdam in April 1857—following his restorative voyage around the Mediterranean and his pictorial tour through the art museums of Italy. “The Syndics of Rembrandt” was one of two Rembrandts that Melville mentioned in his journal after visiting the city’s “Picture Gallery,” now the Rijksmuseum; the other was The Night Watch (NN J 127). The color and pattern of the Turkish rug in the foreground of The Syndics (see fig. 7 below) is very similar to those Metzu’s The Letter Writer and A Woman holding a Glass and a Jug.

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Figure 7. Rembrandt. The Syndics, oil on canvas, 1662. The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

After having taken special note of Rembrandt’s actual painting in full color in Amsterdam 1857, Melville would have the recognized the Syndics surrounding their Turkish rug when the Metropolitan Museum exhibited Charles Koepping’s 1887 etching and drypoint of The Syndics in Gallery M of its newly expanded museum in 1888-89 (see fig. 5 in our introduction to CAT 202). Next to it in Gallery M was Charles-Albert Waltner’s 1887 etching, mezzotint, and aquatint after The Night Watch by Rembrandt that Melville had also seen in Amsterdam in 1857 (see fig. 3 in our introduction  to CAT 202). Each of these ambitious mixed-media engravings after Rembrandt was very large, approximately 30 x 36 inches. Each provided a striking supplement to Melville’s engravings after Metsu’s The Letter Writer, van Mieris’s The Writing Master, and other Dutch paintings from the 1660s.

We have already seen the brightly colored Turkish rug in Vermeer’s c. 1662 painting of Young Woman with a Water Pitcher that Henry G. Marquand donated to the Museum in 1889 (fig. 3 above). Vermeer’s painting was exhibited in the same 1888-89 exhibition featuring the two new, large, virtuoso prints after paintings by Rembrandt (no.29, as Young Woman opening a Casement). Thirty years after seeing the true colors of the Turkish rug in Rembrandt’s The Syndics in Amsterdam, Melville could now see similar colors in the Turkish rug in Vermeer’s painting of Young Woman with a Water Pitcher in New York. Seeing each would have helped him to imagine the true colors of the Turkish rug that covered the table in his copy of John Burnet’s black-and-white engraving of Metzu’s A Man Writing a Letter that is the subject of this entry.   

In our next catalog entry, we will see the Turkish rug featured in Melville’s copy of an 1845 engraving after Caspar Netscher’s 1665 painting A Woman Singing. We will also see the Turkish rugs in original paintings by Netscher and Metsu that arrived at the Metropolitan Museum in 1889 and 1890, when Melville was still revising his conversation among Old Master painters in “At the Hostelry.” 