J. B. Allen after Philip Wouvermans. The Hay Field

Like The Battle Field, The Hay Field by Wouvermans was published in The Royal Gallery of Pictures in 1840. Like that painting, this one in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace was engraved by J. B. Allen. But The Hay Field (fig. 1) differs from The Battle Field (CAT 224, fig. 1) in more than its title and subject. It epitomizes the dramatic change in Wouvermans’ style from the battle scenes of the 1640s to the pastoral scenes of the 1660s, and in subject from swords into ploughshares. 

The Hayfield at Buckingham Palace is a calm, composed pastoral scene rather than a furious scene of battle. Each painting depicts men and animals almost too numerous to count, but those in The Hayfield are comfortably spaced and easily distinguished, not knotted in an indistinguishable mass of motion. The human figures in one painting are making hay, the others are making war. All these contrasts are characteristic of the differences between the battle scenes Wouvermans painted as a young man the mid-1840s and the pastoral scenes he painted over a decade later. Perhaps the greatest difference in these paintings, however, is the difference in color, brightness, and pictorial style. These latter qualities are not as evident in Melville’s print as they are in the original painting, but each version effectively conveys Wouvermans’ ability to transfer the kind of detail you might find in an indoor Dutch genre scene into its spacious outdoor equivalent. 

The commentary that accompanies J. B. Allen’s steel engraving of The Hay Field in The Royal Gallery of Pictures considers this to be “one of the finest of the numerous fine Wouvermans in the Royal Collection.” It also gives close attention to the proliferation of anecdotal detail for which Dutch realist paintings were highly admired at the time: “The foreground is occupied by a barge, and waggon with four horses. The white horse is lying down. The background is taken up with another waggon, and some farm-buildings. In the centre are the mowers. There are various accessory figures, amongst which, a boy bathing, two huntsmen, and a beggar.” Not only are these diverse materials “most exquisitely arranged.” They are “painted in a silvery tone,” with an “exquisite delicacy of touch,” and “with an extraordinary effect of light and shade” (The Royal Gallery, p. 15). Although these stylistic elements are more dramatically present in the original painting, Allen employs the fine lines and subtle effects of steel engraving to create a stunning interplay between solid objects and atmospheric effects. 

Christopher White, in his comprehensive 1982 catalog of Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, was attentive to such details as the several horses who are “unharnessed” and the “young man” who “stuffs hay up a girl’s skirt.” He cites “clear silvery tone” of this painting as evidence that The Hayfield “is a relatively late work.” He also notes that a copy of this painting “with minor variations” is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (White, Dutch Pictures, no. 249, p. 154).  

Young Melville does not appear to have visited Buckingham Palace during his visits to the principal galleries of London in November and December 1849. But the Picture Gallery at Dulwich was one of the first that he did visit, on the afternoon of November 17. This gallery had the largest collection of original paintings by Wouvermans in England (the appendix for the Dulwich Gallery in Melville’s 1843 copy of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art lists 11 separate paintings). One of those paintings, Hay makers and landscape (no. 53 on Hazlitt’s list), is a direct variation on The Hayfield at Buckingham Palace. This painting zooms in on one sandhill supporting one haycart being vigorously uploaded against the sky, below which a white horse, with its own cartload, stands stationary (fig. 2). This is a post-card perfect image of the recurrent motif of the white horse in Wouvermans’s paintings. 

Hazlitt’s commentary, originally published in 1824, notes “that there are several capital pictures of horses, &c., by Wouvermans” at the Dulwich Gallery. But he is particularly drawn to “the one with a hay-cart loading on the top of a rising ground. The composition is as striking and pleasing as the execution is delicate. There is excellent knowledge and character in a Wouvermans horse—an ear, an eye turned round, a cropped tale give you their history and thoughts” (Criticisms, 27-28). This painting soon became so popular in London that it was loaned to the Royal Academy to be copied in 1838 and again in 1848. 

Today this painting at Dulwich is known as Peasants in the Fields: Hay Harvest. The description on the museum website addresses its striking atmospheric effects before it turns to the realism of its genre elements. Wouvermans’ choice of “a vertical—rather than a horizontal—format” for this landscape painting “allows the expanse of the sky to take up most of the picture plane. Grey, silvery clouds hover threateningly against a blue-sky, and contrast with the earthy brown tones of the pyramid of industrious figures. The scene is one of haste before the rain.” In this haste, “the highest figures in the scene load hay onto a waiting cart with pitchforks. Below a figure readies their horse, set to draw a wagon carrying dead game, while a mother and her baby sit patiently by. The low horizon and the wash of water at the foot of the sandhills in the lower right corner are indicative of the Netherlands’ northern coast” (“Peasants in the Fields: Hay Harvest”). 

What an introduction this painting would have given young Melville to Wouvermans as an atmospheric generic landscape painter in 1849. What a memory it would have provided Melville when reading Hazlitt’s commentary about this painting in the copy of Criticisms on Art he acquired in 1871—or when looking at his copy of J. B. Allen’s steel engraving after the painting at Buckingham Palace that is the subject of this entry, perhaps depicting the same hay field from a different vantage point. 

Like Hazlitt twenty-five years earlier, young Melville was quite overwhelmed by paintings he saw at Dulwich Gallery. “The gallery is full of gems,” he wrote in his journal. “Titians, Claudes, Salvators, Murillos.—The Peasant Boys—The Venus—The Peasant Girl—Cardinal Beaufort—The mottled horse of Wouvermans—St John—The Assumption—The old man and Pipe—Mrs. Siddons as Tragic Muse” (NN J 19-20, 298-99). The “mottled horse of Wouvermans” that caught Melville’s attention at the Dulwich Gallery was probably one standing quietly to the left of the painting Courtyard with a Farrier Shoeing a Horse (fig. 3). 

A white horse is the one that is being shod. At first, this horse is hard to recognize because it is only seen from behind as the farrier does his work. This white horse turns its head just enough for us to glimpse his right eye. We see very clearly the whole head of the mottled horse on the left because of how clearly it is silhouetted against the white clothing of the woman standing behind it. The rest of the painting has plenty of local color. This is one of many paintings by Wouvermans whose light, color, and setting resemble the Italianate paintings of Jan Both, but Wouvermans seems never to have been in Italy.  

Philip Wouvermans seems to have spent his whole life in or near his hometown of Haarlem, in close proximity to his younger brothers Pieter and Jan. He would have been about twenty years old when he drew the Self-Portrait in red chalk we see below (fig. 4).

Wouvermans painted a great variety of subjects between his furious battle scenes in the 1640s and his pastoral scenes of the 1660s. One of his recurrent subjects throughout this period was “the halt,” the pause of a group of horses and riders when traveling either to or from such activities as hawking parties, military exercises, or explorations of the countryside.

One such halt was the subject of the one illustration in the Wouvermans section of Melville’s two-volume copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, published in London in 1854 and acquired by Melville in 1871 (the same year he acquired his copy of Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art, published in London in 1843). The caption in the Works volume identifies its subject as "The Officer’s Halt" (fig. 5), a subject that is elaborated at some length in the accompanying commentary. The signature white horse, of course, is at the center of the action. 

The commentor in Works begins by declaring that “These are men and horses only to be found in the paintings of the Flemish school.” He follows with a sentence as extended as the action he describes: “Mark the two steeds, on one of which an officer is mounted, who has just quaffed a huge draught of strong ale, and is holding out the pot to a girl, who is, however, delayed by an other worthy in gay apparel, who pinches her chin familiarly with one hand, while he clutches his horse’s bridle with the other.” The horse on which this officer is mounted is “admirably rendered—position, form, head, harness, all are painted with vigour and truth.” In addition, “all the accessories of the picture are admirable. The beggar whom no one notices, the distant hills and river beneath them, the ferry-boat, the card-players round their table, the boys laying with the dog, the great tree shattered by many a storm, the tent, all demonstrate the power and vigour of the painter” (1: 259). 

All the details in the above commentary in Works became much more vivid for Londoners in 1871 when the original painting, now known as Cavalry halted at a Sutler’s Booth, was acquired from a private collection by the National Gallery (fig. 6). The painting itself is dated “probably 1650s.” Its vertical composition resembles that of Peasants in the Fields; Hay Harvest at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (figure 2 above). This format allows the high blue sky, blending with the sun-softened clouds and the green shoots from the shattered tree, to bring a bit of sublime dignity to the intricate cluster of human and equine interaction taking place in the space between the sitting figures in the foreground and the open tent attached to the tree. The commentary on the National Gallery website explains that a “sutler” was an itinerant peddler, often a woman, who habitually followed traveling soldiers, erecting her “booth” (in this case the open tent) in which to provide refreshments of various kinds. 

It is interesting to see that the angle of the slant of the land on which the officers and their horses are prancing in the painting Cavalrymen halted at a Sutler’s Booth (engraved as “The Officer’s Halt” in Melville’s copy of Works) so closely resembles the angle of the slant of land on which the cavalry and their horses are fighting in the painting A Skirmish of Cavalry (CAT 224, fig. 1), engraved as The Battle-Field in Melville’s print collection (CAT 224). 

In 1871, when Melville was acquiring his copies The Works of Eminent Masters and Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art, the trustees of the newly chartered Metropolitan Museum of Art were acquiring the 174 paintings, primarily from Paris and Brussels, to be featured in its inaugural exhibition in 1872. These imported paintings (subsequently known as “The Founding Purchase of 1871”) included two Wouvermans paintings entitled The Halt, but neither was by Philip.

One was by his younger brother Pieter (b. 1623), no. 71 in the inaugural exhibition. This Halt featured Philip’s signature white horse in the foreground (fig. 7). 

The other painting entitled The Halt was by Philip’s younger brother Jan (b. 1629), no. 72 in the inaugural exhibition. This painting (fig. 8) was a broader landscape vista reminiscent of the style of Swanevelt’s Italianate Landscape with Bridge (CAT 204, fig. 2).

These paintings by Pieter and Jan Wouvermans would presumably have been of interest to Melville as the novelist who had alluded to the art of their elder brother in Mardi in 1849 (NN M 42), as the traveler who had taken special notice of “the mottled horse of Wouvermans” at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1849 (NN J 19-20), and as the collector who had acquired the contrasting prints of The Battle Field and The Harvest Field at some unknown date(s). Melville might also have been interested paintings by Pieter and Jan in relation to those of their older brother Philip after acquiring his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters in 1871, one year before the paintings by Pieter and Jan were displayed in the inaugural exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum. 

The commentor in Works, after discussing the virtues of “Officers’ Halt,” addressed what “appears to be a well ascertained fact, that Wouvermans, towards the end of his career, threw into the fire whole portfolios of drawings and studies from nature. The reason for this is not really known. Some say, that he wanted to deprive his son of those rich portfolios, for fear that his native idleness would thus be encouraged; while others alleged, that he wished to deprive his brother and rival of the advantage which he might have derived from such studies” (1: 259). We might never know the extent or motive of such actions. Nor do we know why Melville chose to destroy most of his own literary manuscripts.  

Melville was, of course, keenly interested in sibling rivalries and artistic influences. One can imagine him standing directly in front of Pieter Wouvermans' The Halt and wondering how much of the shape, color, and expression of its highly conspicuous white horse might be traced to the paintings, studies, and drawings of his older brother. Similarly, one can imagine Melville standing directly before Jan Wouvermans' more expansive depiction of The Halt and thinking of how closely its riverside travelers resemble those in his own print of Swanevelt’s Morning (our CAT 214). Or how the overarching bridge in this painting resembled the one in Swanevelt’s Italianate Landscape with a Bridge at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. 

The contrasting paintings by Pieter and Jan Wouvermans were still being exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum at the time of Melville’s death in September 1891 (the Halt by Jan Wouvermans was then hanging in Old Eastern Gallery Y of the Museum, in close proximity to most of the Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Museum we have discussed in this chapter). Both of these paintings, however, were later deaccessioned, The Halt by Pieter Wouvermans being sold at the American Art Association in 1928, The Halt by Jan Wouverman being sold at Parke-Bernet in 1956.

Current records seem to indicate that the first painting by Philip Wouvermans to enter Museum’s collection was A Man and a Woman on Horseback, a relaxed and sociable scene along a canal painted around 1653-54 and acquired in 1979. Since so many of this painter’s sketches and drawings were destroyed during his lifetime, I will end this entry with A Mounted Grey Horse Being Schooled in Piaffe, a charming drawing in “black chalk, graphite, brush and gray wash” created after 1646, “with framing lines in black chalk or graphite, by a later hand,” acquired by the Museum in 2013 (fig 9).