Vermeer and Metsu

Like Melville’s engravings after Metsu’s The Letter Writer and van Mieris’s The Writing Master, this painting features a single figure near a table covered by a Turkish rug. In this case, Melville would have been able to see the “highly variegated tapestry” of the Turkish rug in color. At the time of its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum in 1889, The Young Woman with a Water Pitcher had “long been ascribed” to Metsu, “whose reputation still far surpassed Vermeer’s in the Gilded Age.” This painting had in fact had been sold as a Metsu as recently as 1878 (Quodbach, fig. 5, p. 12).

The connections between Metsu and Vermeer that Robinson made when resurrecting Metsu's art-historical reputation in 1974 were amplified by Adriaan Waiboer when his exhibition Gabriel Metsu: Rediscovered master of the Dutch Golden Age opened at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin in April 2010. In addition to using a detail from A Man Writing a Letter as the cover art for the catalog (fig. 4), Waiboer made that painting a centerpiece of his own catalog essay entitled “Why buy a Vermeer when a Metsu is available?”

That exhibition had opened in Dublin before moving on to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery in Washington because the National Gallery of Ireland had acquired both Metsu’s A Man Writing a Letter and its companion painting A Woman Reading a Letter (fig. 5) from the last in a series of private collections in England. Reproducing those two paintings side by side, Waiboer relates both works to a variety of like scenes by Metsu’s contemporary Vermeer in a way that establishes without doubt the mutual influence between the one artist in Amsterdam and the other in Delft during the 1660s (pp. 40-44; cat. 15, 16, figs. 31, 32).

Waiboer’s subsequent account of the contrasting fortunes of these two painters in the art market--in which Vermeer’s reputation had totally eclipsed that of Metsu by the early twentieth century--prepares his case for a twenty-first century revival of Metsu’s reputation in relation to that of Vermeer (45-50). Melville’s engravings after An Old Man Selling Poultry and Game and A Man Writing a Letter go to the heart of the case made for Metsu’s excellence throughout the 2010 exhibition catalog. 

The commentator in Melville’s 1853 copy of The Works of Eminent Masters suggests that Metsu’s house is to him “a world; he gathers into this one place . . . as many delights as were heaped up in the ancient palaces of the kings of Ectaban and Susa" (1: 366). So Melville must have felt about his house on East 26th Street that held the world of his print collection. Robinson in 1974 sees The Letter Writer and its companion painting A Woman Writing a Letter not only as Metsu’s “finest” paintings but as “cultural artifacts” of a generation. Their “orderly perfection seems to have preserved forever the optimism of a nation that, in the sixties, could claim to be not only the creator of a large colonial empire but, to a degree, the centre, financially and culturally, of northern Europe. That this situation began to change by the end of Metsu’s life in 1667 once more proves how transitory classic moments are” (61). Melville, building his print collection in his spare hours throughout the 1870s and 1880s, was certainly aware of such transitoriness—in the families and artists as well as of nations.