Netscher and ter Borch's "White Satin Gowns"

Melville had a chance to see one of ter Borch’s most famous (and influential) white satin gowns when he visited Amsterdam in April 1857 after spending six weeks in the galleries and museums of Italy. The one day he spent at the Trippinhuis (now the Rijksmuseum) gave him his first full immersion in paintings by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. We know some of what he saw from the April 24 journal entry in which he mentioned Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and The Syndics (our CAT 202 INT, figs. 3 & 6). He also mentioned seeing by paintings by Breugel & Teniers & Paul Potter along with fashionable portraits, a nautical punishment scene, and Dutch convivial scenes (NN J 127). Among the most striking paintings in the collection, then as now, was ter Borch’s Paternal Admonition (fig. 5). Not surprisingly, it soon became known as “the gown painting.” 

Painted around 1654, this canvas was the first to show ter Borch’s unmatched ability to convey the color, folds, and feel of a silver satin gown worn by a statuesque young woman. This canvas, now still at the Rijksmuseum, was immediately so popular that ter Borch painted a second version, now at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, in 1660. Both versions were so widely admired that additional variations upon the painting itself, and especially its unforgettable gown, continued to emerge from students and colleagues of ter Borch. One striking example from a student was Casper Netscher’s A Lesson on a Bass Viol (c. 1664-65) that Melville probably saw during his visit to the Louvre in 1849 (fig. 3 above). The color and texture of Netscher’s satin gown at the Louvre are similar, but Netscher provides a frontal view of the gown and upper body of the young woman, whereas ter Borch shows only the neck of his young woman above a full view of her dress from behind, adding mystery to the interplay between the three figures on his canvas. 

Melville left no direct record of whether he saw the front of Netscher’s silver satin gown in Paris in 1849 or the back of ter Borch’s influential predecessor in Amsterdam in 1857, but we do know that he did have personal access to the engraving after the Amsterdam version of ter Borch’s Parental Admonition in the copy of Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland that he acquired at some date after its publication in 1880 (fig. 6). 

The engraving after Paternal Advice is one of two images after ter Borch in Gower’s book; the other is The Lute Player from the Cassel Gallery (see fig. 13 below). Gower’s discussion of Parental Advice provoked one of Melville’s rare annotations in that book. Gower begins his chapter on ter Borch by discussing the famous painting in Amsterdam “known as The Satin Gown.” He objects that this painting became “even more celebrated” after the rhapsodic praise it received from Goethe in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), the novel he published in 1809. Gower declares that Goethe had erred by imposing his own poetic imagination upon a painting whose creator had “only wished to show his marvellous power of rendering the quality and texture of a white satin gown on a graceful female form, relieved by the black dress of another lady and by the buff jerkin of a cavalier.” Gower therefore dismisses the painting as “one of the many genre pictures . . . which the Mierises and the Metsus were wont to paint” (13-15). Melville responded by placing an "x" in the margin near the phrase “white satin gown” and adding this annotation at the top of the page: “Lord R. G. in this criticism stamps himself hardly as a profound intelligence” (see figure 7 below). 

Melville’s annotation may be critiquing Gower’s critique of Goethe as well as of ter Borch. As we saw in Chapter 2 above, Melville had Goethe very much in mind when he arrived in Rome in February 1857, marking many passages in his copy of Goethe’s Travels in Italy, including the one in which Goethe declared that “I reckon a new-birth day, new birth from the day that I entered Rome” (https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=47&PageID=11103). Melville had also been familiar with Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and presumably its high praise for ter Borch’s “satin gown” picture, as early as July 1854, when that book was checked out by his father-in-law during Herman’s visit to Boston (Sealts no. 227). Melville had himself acquired his own copies of Goethe’s Autobiography and Letters from Italy before leaving London in December 1849 (Sealts, no. 228). Whatever Melville’s conscious exposure to ter Borch’s “satin gown” painting may have been during his visit to the Trippinhuis in April 1857, the annotation he made  next to Gower’s commentary (and illustration) after 1880 show his awareness of Paternal Admonition and of interpretive issues surrounding it. 

Interest in ter Borch’s “satin gown” paintings remains strong in the twenty-first century. In 2019 the Amsterdam and Berlin versions of Paternal Admonition were brought together for the first time in more than 350 years at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. By then the mysteries of ter Borch’s depiction of the young woman (and the satin gown) from behind had resulted in a challenge to the title Paternal Admonition by those who see the painting as A Gallant Conversation. Like Gower in the passage marked by Melville above, they see male figure on the right as too young to be the young lady’s father, whose gesture does not seem to be an admonition. They therefore interpret him as an urgent suitor in a betrothal or a brothel scene, depending on how one interprets the large bed looming in the background and various implements of allurement on the Turkish rug covering the table to the left of the woman whose face we cannot see (“Gerard Ter Borch’s ‘Gallant Conversation’”). One expects the authors of Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Melville’s Pierre would each have appreciated such ambiguities. 

For more on Melville’s relation to Goethe as a print collector, as well as a writer, see “Goethe Yes and No” in our introduction to “Herman Melville as a Print Collector”