A. H. Payne after Allart van Everdingen. Eine Gebirgs-Landschaft. A Mountain Landscape

While Meindert Hobbema was painting Dutch water mills during the 1660s, Allart [Aldert] van  Everdingen was painting Scandanavian waterfalls. A native of Harlem, young van Everdingen (1621-1675) had traveled to Norway and Sweden in 1644 on a trip that “was to have profound consequences on his art.”  Back in Holland, van Everdingen had completed “four majestic mountain views” in 1647, and by 1648 he “had introduced to his countrymen his full repertory of Nordic motifs—mountain views, rock and water scenes, and waterfalls. He continued to paint rocky terrains, fir trees, cascades, watermills and blockhouses for the remainder of his career.” A waterfall with a “vertical design” became “the artist’s preferred and most influential composition type.” Jacob van Ruisdael was among the painters he most directly influenced. Many later waterfalls by van Everdingen repeated sketches he had made twenty years earlier (Davies, Grove 10: 660-61).  

Melville’s Mountain Landscape in the engraving by A. H. Payne reproduces one of those waterfalls in a vertical format that Everdingen made after he moved to Amsterdam in 1652.  Alice I. Davies catalogs it as Norwegian Waterfall in her 1978 monograph of Everdingen’s paintings, including it among the “Scandanavian Landscapes of the Sixties and Seventies” (cat. 125, fig. 269, Staatliche-Museen-Bode, Berlin). Davis notes that “the overwhelming majority of Everdingen’s paintings after 1660 are waterfalls,” many of them being relatively uninspired variations on images he had painted with much more force twenty years earlier. In those early powerful waterfalls that were such an early influence on Ruisdael, “man was insignificant and helpless.” Later, however, “the waterfall assumes the passive role—just another picturesque motive in the same league with the decorative stump, the wooden footbridge, the rustic cabin, the grove of tall pine,” and the people and sheep “who inhabit this region in comfort” (208-11, 214). Davies, in her catalogue raisonné of van Everdingen's paintings in 2001, identifies this painting as Norwegian Waterfall (cat. 144, plate 144).

The water in Melville’s Everdingen waterfall engraved by Payne is certainly dramatic and active compared to the one in his copy of Hobbema’s watermill engraved by Jeavons. When Payne’s engraving was reproduced in Berlin and its Treasures in 1854, the accompanying letterpress emphasized the degree to which this “grand and beautiful picture” differs from the works of Everdingen’s Dutch contemporaries by depicting “the wild and picturesque scenery of Norway” with a “gloomy grandeur” that has “procured him the name of the northern Salvatore Rosa” (228). Jacob van Ruisdael became the one Dutch painter to match and surpass Everdingen in this regard, as Melville could have seen in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters.  

The short essay on “The Waterfall, by Ruisdael” in the first volume of Works is illustrated by a full-page engraving of one of Ruisdael’s most powerful waterfalls in a vertical format very similar to that of the Everdingen (fig. 1). Ruisdael’s painting, like Everdingen’s Mountain Landscape, has a cottage near the edge of the stream and a castle high on the hill, but in the engraving after Ruisdael the brute force of the water and the sublime isolation of the scene do render Everdingen’s more sentimental deployment of the same motifs more passively picturesque (1: 14-16). 

Everdingen did not receive any separate essays or chapters in any of Melville’s books on art, but he does come up twice in relation to Ruisdael. The main essay on Ruisdael in volume 2 of Works declares that the model for Ruisdael’s most powerful waterfall scenes “was evidently Everdingen, who was rather older, and, during a residence in Norway, drew from the fountain of Nature” (2: 117). Cundall in 1891 in his chapter on Ruisdael notes that “the work of Everdingen at one time had a great influence on his style, as is shown by his pictures of Northern scenery,” but Cundall noted that much still remained to be known about Everdingen’s own life and career apart from “his influence on Ruisdael” (14-15).    

In September 2021, the Stedelijk Museum in Alkmaar mounted the first comprehensive exhibition addressing all the major components of Everdingen’s artistry (his paintings, his drawings, his prints, and his pictorial narrative of the adventures of Reynard the Fox). Much more was now known about the degree to which Everdingen and Ruisdael had influenced each other through multiple decades. The formative influence of Everdingen’s pioneering paintings of Scandanavian mountain scenes on Ruisdael from the late 1640s had long been known, but this exhibition helped show how marine scenes such as Everdingen’s stormy View of Haarlem from the Noorder Buiten Spaarne from the 1650s (fig. 2 below; no. 21 in the Alkmaar catalog) influenced paintings such as Ruisdael’s Breakwater from 1670-72 (our CAT 221, fig. 7).

The 2021 exhibition also provided the opportunity for an expanded understanding of the degree to which Everdingen influenced the rise of Romanticism in the arts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in Germany. Arthur Wheelock, in a comprehensive review of the Alkmaar exhibition, notes that Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was “a huge admirer of Van Everdingen’s etchings,” having proudly acquired first impressions of the Reynard the Fox series which looked “as if they were made yesterday.” Goethe and other pioneers of the Romantic movement "greatly admired” both Van Everdingen and Van Ruisdael “for the naturalism of their paintings and for their interpretations of untamed nature, which they connected with the idea of ‘sublime.'" Wheelock cites the passage in which Goethe, travelling from the Brenner Pass to Italy in 1786, "remarked that he had seen a moonlit landscape with waterfalls and foaming waters of a river rushing between age-old pines that reminded him of a painting Van Everdingen” (Wheelock). Melville is likely to have read this passage in his copy of Goethe’s Travels in Italy, which he brought from London in 1849 and marked heavily, though not in this particular passage (see MMO 228). 

The inaugural exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872 did not include any paintings by Allart van Everdingen, though it did include one by his brother Caesar (Vanitas, no. 36 in the 1872 catalog). In 1889, the Museum did acquire a painting by Ruisdael which showed some of his early affinities in subject and mood with Everdingen (Forest Stream, c. 1660, our CAT 221, fig. 10). In 1900, however, the museum acquired a later painting by Ruisdeal, Mountain Torrent from the 1670s, that was actually reattributed to Everdingen for much of the twentieth century (fig. 3).

By the 1670s, Ruisdael, like Everdingen, was running the mountain torrents of Everdingen’s paintings of the 1640s through a less rugged, more picturesque Nordic landscape whose waterfalls, mountains, rustic cabins, and wooden bridges were now being enjoyed by people and sheep “who inhabit this region in comfort.” In making the rugged landscape more picturesque, each artist was now making his Nordic paintings increasingly “accessible to the domestic audience for which they were intended” (Leidtke, 2007, p. 790).