Netscher and Metsu At The Metropolitan Museum

Gower’s book has a detailed appendix on “The Principal Works of the Figure Painters of Holland” in the public galleries of Europe (81-118). This would have been useful to Melville in remembering the artists, names, and places of paintings he had seen on his visits to London and Paris in 1849 and in the galleries of Italy, the Netherlands, and England in 1857. The entry for ter Borch’s Paternal Advice in Amsterdam indicated that “similar pictures are in the Berlin Museum, and in the Bridgewater House Gallery, London, and a study for it in the Dresden Gallery” (85). Gower’s entry for Netscher’s The Lesson on the Bass-Viol at the Louvre indicated that it has been “engraved by Bittheusen and in Filhol” (116). Even more helpful than entries such as those in the appendix of Gower’s book was the arrival at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of original paintings by most of the figure painters of Holland whose prints Melville was then collecting in his own home on 26th Street (1871-1891).

The first painting by Gaspar Netscher to arrive in New York City was the Portrait of a Dutch Lady that was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1871 and displayed in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition in 1872 at the Dodworth Building on Fifth Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets. Now known as a Portrait of a Lady with a Dog on a Table (fig. 8), this painting remained at the Metropolitan Museum until it was deaccessioned and sold at auction in 1989 (Baetjer, 2004, no. 55 on p. 230). Melville would have had potential access to this painting any time between the inaugural exhibition in February 1872 until his death in September 1891, when Netscher’s Portrait of a Dutch Lady was one of 151 Pictures by Old Masters in the Old Eastern Gallery Y from November 1890 to April 1891, and again from May to November 1891 (no. 41 on p. 6 in Hand-Book No. 6).

CAT 209 fig 8 Caspar_Netscher_-_A_lady_and_her_spaniel 1673 de-Met wikipedia (1).jpg

Figure 8. Caspar Netscher. Portrait of a Lady with a Dog on a Table, oil on canvas, 1673. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acquired 1870, deaccessioned 1989.

As a museumgoer, Melville would have immediately seen this painting as yet another variation by Netscher on ter Borch’s early “satin-gown paintings.” As a reader of Gower, he would have recognized this as one of those later paintings in which Netscher moved from the musical conversations he had painted in the manner of van Mieris and Metsu in the mid-1660s to a very lucrative career as a portrait painter in “the elegant, aristocratic” style of “the Hague followers of Anthony Van Dyck” in the court of William III, who “especially esteemed” portraits by Netscher (79-80). The landscape in the background of the Portrait of a Dutch Lady from 1673 anticipates “a number of pastoral landscape scenes” that Netscher was to paint the early 1680s (Jansen 915-16).

Forty years after depicting the “Turkish-rugged waters” highlighting the "glistening white shadow" of Moby Dick's forehead in chapter 133 of Moby-Dick, Melville would surely have noted the Turkish rug on the table as well as the white satin gown on the Dutch lady posing for her portrait. As a print collector, Melville would have seen similarities between the dog on this lady’s table and the dog on a much smaller table near a woman with a very different style of clothing in his print after Veronese’s Le Fille de Paul Veronese (CAT 110).

The second painting by Netscher to arrive at the Metropolitan Museum was The Card Party (fig. 9). It arrived in 1886, the first year after Melville’s retirement from the Custom House in New York. This painting is a classic “Conversation Piece” among “fashionable figures in luxurious interiors” in which Netscher, Metsu, van Mieris, and ter Borch all excelled. The young lady whose golden gown we see from behind in Netscher’s painting from the mid-1660s is a clear variation on young lady whose silver gown we see from behind in ter Borch’s painting from the mid-1650s. The tiny dog she is reaching toward on the embroidered chair at the center of the painting seems to be a younger version of the same dog who had been sitting next to the elbow of the lady in the satin gown ever since Netscher’s 1672 Portrait of a Lady had first been exhibited in New York in 1872.

CAT 209 fig 9 Netscher card party NY Met.jpg

Figure 9. Caspar Netscher. The Card Party, oil on canvas, ca. 1665. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889.

Netscher in The Card Party was trying to create the same kind of ambiguity among a small group of seemingly static persons that ter Borch had achieved in Paternal Admonition. Here the lady standing in the gown on the left is being attended to by the man sitting at the large Turkish-rugged table as well as by the dog standing on the embroidered chair beneath her (the seated man is thought by some commentators to be Netscher himself). This three-way dynamic on the left contrasts with the more straightforward energies on the right, where the man who is standing above the woman sitting in the rose-colored dress is perfectly positioned to see the cards she is holding beyond the breasts in the dress.

The painting we now know as The Card Party was first seen at the Museum as a loan from Henry G. Marquand to the 1886-87 exhibition of Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings owned by Charles Sedelmeyer. Marquand donated the painting to the Museum as part of the Exhibition of 1888-1889 that inaugurated the new addition to the original building. In 1890, the painting, then known as A Game of Piquet, was displayed among the Collection of Old Masters in the New Eastern Gallery O (pp. 3-4, no. 2 in Hand-Book No. 10; Liedtke 2007, pp. 518-20).

In 1890, Netscher’s A Game of Piquet was joined by Metsu’s A Musical Party, another gift from Henry G. Marquand (fig. 10). This musical party is about to begin. The young man at the far right is tuning a bass viol as the young lady in the orange satin gown is holding the neck of her mandolin with one hand while passing a songbook to the man behind her with the other. The sense of improvisation is heightened by the outer garments on the floor behind the man turning his instrument, the musical manuscripts on the floor in front of the woman passing the song book, and another songbook about to slip off of the Turkish rug covering the table.

CAT 209 fig 8 metsu the music party the met marquand 1890.jpg

Figure 10. Gabriel Metsu. A Musical Party, 1659. Metropolitan Museum, New York. Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1890.

In this highly animated scene, the ambiguities are much more overt and physical than in “conversation pieces” more typical of van Mieris, Netscher, Dou, and ter Borch. This painting has some of the rambunctiousness often seen in paintings Jan Steen, and some commentators have seen Steen as the man on left , with Metzu and his wife welcoming him to the party (Liedtke 2004, 458-59). This painting takes us from the poised privacy of the window niche of Melville’s print of Netscher’s A Singing Lady into the open action of Mestu’s more social setting.

From November 1890 until Melville’s death in September 1891, Metsu’s Musical Party was on display with Netscher’s Game of Piquet in the Old Eastern Gallery O. During the same period in the Old Eastern Gallery Y, Netscher’s Portrait of a Dutch Lady was on display with two paintings we have seen by Steen, A Dutch Kermesse and The Old Rat is Trapped at Last (CAT 104 PT, figs. 3 & 4). A Portrait of the Artist by ter Borch was also in the same gallery. All four paintings in Gallery Y had been displayed in the Inaugural Exhibition of 1872 as part of the Museum’s Original Purchase. They all remained in the Museum for more than a century before being deaccessioned and put up for auction.