Ter Borch at the Metropolitan Museum and in “At the Hostelry”

Reviewing this presumed self-portrait at the Inaugural Exhibition in 1872, Henry James found it to be “exceptionally large” for a Terburg (ter Borch). The image has thereby “lost in interest what it has gained in magnitude.” James was happy to see that “the  famous white dress of Terburg . . . is represented with almost equal brilliancy in a charming Netscher” (James 759). That painting was Netscher’s Portrait of a Dutch Lady, now known as Lady with a Dog on a Table (our fig. 8 above). 

In 1889 the Metropolitan Museum acquired a second painting by ter Borch. His Portrait of a Seated Man (figure 12) was another gift from Henry Marquand. It arrived in time to be included in the 1888-89 exhibition inaugurating the Museum’s new building. This painting was closer to ter Borch’s customary portrait size (14 x 12 inches) and was listed in the exhibition catalog simply as Cabinet Portrait (no. 25). It is now considered to be the first of seven authentic ter Borch’s in the collection. 

This portrait feels large because its subject, whose substantial hat sits as comfortably on the table as he does on the chair, fills so much of the available space. His identity is unknown, but he is thought to be “one of the artist’s numerous clients in and around Deventer” (Liedtke 2007, p. 74). Painted in the late 1650s or early 1660s, this was another painting in the Metropolitan Museum depicting a Dutch contemporary of Harmen Harmense, Melville’s Gansevoort ancestor who left the Netherlands for Albany shortly before 1660. 

Melville was fully retired from the Custom House by the time Netscher’s The Card Party was first displayed in 1886, followed by Metsu’s Musical Party and ter Borch’s Portrait of a Seated Man in 1888-89. As the number and quality of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Metropolitan Museum continued to grow, Melville now had more time to attend to the expanding print collection and art library in his own home. He also had more time to see original paintings by contemporary and Old Master artists in the galleries near his home at Madison Square and at the Metropolitan Museum uptown in Central Park. All these opportunities fed into the extensive revisions he was making in “At the Hostelry,” the ambitious poetic colloquy among Old Master painters that he was still revising at the time of his death in 1891. 

We have seen in this section prints after van Mieris, Metsu, and Netscher from Melville’s collection, but none of these painters appear in “At the Hostelry.” Melville does not appear to have collected any prints after ter Borch, but ter Borch does appear (as Turburg in Melville's poem). He is mentioned by Jan Steen in a four-line sequence that shows Melville’s sophistication in understanding the differences between two groups of 16th-century Dutch realist painters: Teniers, til Borgh, van Ostade, and Steen on the one hand (discussed in our entries for CAT 202-204), and van Mieris, Metsu, Netscher, and ter Borch on the other (our CAT 205-209). These four lines elaborate on Steen’s declaration that “All’s picturesque beneath the sun”: 

For me, ‘tis life, plain life, I limn— 

Not satin-glossed and flossy-fine 

(Our Turburg’s forte here, good for him); 

No, but the life that’s wine and brine (NN BBO 162) 

“Satin-glossed and flossy-fine” is the perfect phrase for the “white satin gowns” in original paintings by ter Borch and Netscher that Melville could have seen at the Louvre in Paris in 1849, at the Trippinhuis in Amsterdam in 1857, and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York after 1872. It is also a fine phrase for the “white satin gowns” in paintings by ter Borch and Netscher that Gower discussed, reproduced, and documented in his chapters on ter Borch and Netscher in The Figure Painters of Holland. In addition to its engraving after Parental Advice (fig. 6 above), Gower’s chapter on ter Borch included this engraving of The Lute-Player (fig. 13): 

This image of a woman playing a lute known as a theorbo combines many elements with which ter Borch influenced the next generation of Dutch painters including van Mieris, Metzu, and Netscher: a domestic scene in which music is being played, often by a young woman in a “satin-glossed” gown, with close attention to the instrument being played. The original painting at the State Museum in Cassel (Kassel) from which Gower’s image was engraved (fig. 14) is one of nearly a dozen images in which ter Borch depicted a woman playing a lute in a shimmering satin gown, often enhanced, as here, by a jacket trimmed in fur. 

In Melville’s print collection, the engraving of ter-Borch’s The Lute-Player in his 1880 copy of Gower related to more than his prints after paintings by his younger Dutch colleagues van Mieris, Metsu, and Netscher from the 1660s. The closest connection in subject, instrument, fashion, and solitude in his copy of Finette, Rajon’s 1870 etching after Watteau’s 1717 painting (our CAT 160). 

Watteau in Finette takes ter Borch’s lute player outdoors and turns her face directly the viewer. Melville in “At the Hostelry” follows Steen’s commentary on ter Borch with Watteau’s colloquy with Veronese, after “complimenting Steen” (NN BBO 162).