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

The name Philip Wouvermans is spelled nineteen different ways in the Union List of Artist Names. The preferred spelling among art historians today is Philips Wouwerman, but I will retain in this entry the spelling that was most common to English-language readers Melville’s day.  

Philip Wouvermans (1619-1668) was born and died in Haarlem. He was the son of a painter, as were his painter brothers Pieter and Paulus. He first became famous as a painter of horses and battle scenes; much later, he began to paint expansive pastoral scenes. Melville’s two prints after Philip Wouvermans represent the two major stages in the painter’s career. The battle scene engraved as The Battle Field dates from around 1646, when Wouvermans was in his late twenties. The pastoral scene engraved as The Hay Field was painted in the 1660s, when the painter was in his fifties. 

When the print that Melville acquired as The Battle Field was published in The Royal Gallery of Pictures in 1840, the accompanying text described the painting itself as “a furious attack of cavalry, on the brow of a hill” (see fig. 1 below). The author considered this scene to be “most admirably painted,” and he noted that “the introduction of the white horse” identified Wouvermans as the artist, though some did attribute the picture to "Dirk Stoop, a well-known painter of battles and horses” (14).

White suggested in 1982 that Wouvermans’ early battle scenes do not represent “specific engagements” but “are between imaginary opponents” (p. 152). The commentary on A Skirmish of Cavalry on the Royal Collection Trust website in 2025 emphasizes that the “irrational and chaotic cruelty” of seventeenth-century “land war” had resulted in the a new genre of war paintings: the “battle without hero.” This painting does include a few “flashes of traditional battlefield glamour” (such as “the regimental standard and the mounted trumpeter silhouetted against the sky”), but “the mass of soldiery is indistinct and indistinguishable in the shadows of the foreground. Closer examination reveals nothing very heroic, only confusion and slaughter. It is not even possible to establish who is fighting for whom” (“A Skirmish of Cavalry, c. 1646”).  

A painting such as Wouvermans’ A Skirmish of Cavalry from the mid-1640s, and the engraving from that painting that Allen published as The Battle Field in 1840, began to have new valence in the United States after its Civil War broke out in 1861. One early intimation of the “battle without hero” in American Civil War poetry is Emily Dickinson’s evocation of “Battle’s—horrid Bowl” in "It feels a shame to be Alive—” (c. 1863; Dickinson, J. 444).  

A more sustained evocation of “battles without heroes” runs throughout Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, the entire book of Civil War poetry that Melville published at the end of the War in 1866. Most of the first 50 poems are named for specific battles (with the month and year in which they took place in parentheses). The next sixteen poems, under the heading “Verses Inscriptive and Memorial,” memorialize the victims of war in a more generic sense. Those victims include the young soldiers in Melville’s ode “On the Slain Collegians” who “Went from the North and came from the South, / With golden mottoes in the mouth, / To lie down midway on a bloody bed” (NN BP 118). 

One poem in Melville’s Battle-Pieces stands out from all the others in its length, in its relation to Melville’s personal life, and in relation to his copy of The Battle Field that J. B. Allen had engraved after Wouvermans’ A Skirmish of Cavalry. “The Scout toward Aldie” is by far the longest poem in the collection, consisting of 798 lines in 114 stanzas filling 23 pages (NN BP 139-162). This poem resulted from the visit Herman and his brother Allan had made in April 1864 to the battle grounds in northern Virginia still being contested by the opposing “Armies of the Wilderness.” The Melville brothers had got permission to visit their cousin Lieutenant Colonel Henry Gansevoort at the Union base in the general vicinity of the furious Battle of Aldie that had taken place on June 17, 1863. Henry was away from camp when Herman and Allan arrived, and Herman was allowed to join a mounted scouting party attempting to establish the current location of the Confederate guerilla forces led by John S. Mosby who had been harassing Union troops in surprise skirmishes creating constant fear. 

Melville set the opening stanza of the poem in a denuded hillside similar to the one in Wouvermans’ A Skirmish of Cavalry that Allen had engraved as The Battle Field: 

The cavalry-camp lies on the slope 

   Of what was late a vernal hill, 

But now like a pavement bare— 

An outpost in the perilous wilds 

   Which ever are lone and still; 

       But Mosby’s men and there— 

       Of Mosby best beware. (NN PP p. 139, lines 1-7) 

We do not know whether Melville had acquired Allen’s 1840 print before or after publishing his 1866 poem, but the print collector and poet who acquired the print and wrote the poem would have certainly felt the affinity between them whenever he had them both at hand.  

Melville had already alluded to Wouvermans once, in Mardi, published in early 1849 (a few months before he crossed the Atlantic and saw the picture galleries of England for the first time). In chapter 13 of Mardi, Melville describes a furious scene in which a Killer whale and a Thrasher whale attack a Right whale in spite of its much larger size. “This sight we beheld,” writes Melville. “Had old Wouvermans, who once painted a bull bait been along with us, a rare chance, that for his pencil” (NN M 42). Melville scholars have not yet identified a “bull bait” painted by Wouvermans; perhaps he had heard about the dogs who are furiously attacking the bear in Potter’s famous Bear Hunt (our CAT 223, fig. 4; see also Dennis Bertold 1992 essay on “Melville and Dutch Genre Painting,” pp. 223-24). Whatever painting Melville may actually have been alluding to, he was comparing the ferocity of small whales attacking a much larger whale to that of small dogs attacking a much larger bull, with the implication that in warfare the human species is capable of such primal ferocity as well. 

There were no “furious battles” of comparable intensity in Melville’s autobiographical “The Scout toward Aldie.” The furious battle at Aldie was the one that had taken place in June of the previous year—and its battlefield was still littered with skulls and other byproducts of the war that Melville described in his poem “Armies of the Wilderness (winter 1863-1864).” Some vestiges of that previous battle are also seen in “The Scout toward Aldie”—in mutilated limbs of Union soldiers and mangled trees of the forest. A more immediate concern in that poem was the rumor that “a band” of Mosby’s troops still “lodged / In green retreats of hills that peer / By Aldie (famed for the swordless charge).” Melville’s footnote here explains that “in one of Kilpatrick’s earlier cavalry fights near Aldie, a [Union] Colonel who, being under arrest, had been temporarily deprived of his sword, nevertheless, unarmed, insisted upon charging at the head of his men, which he did, and the onset proved victorious” (NN BBO pp. 142, 179, n. 5).  

That Union officer who had led the “swordless charge,” in spite of being under arrest by his own army, was Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a colonel in New York’s Fourth Cavalry. Cesnola and the troops he inspired won the skirmish, but he was badly injured in the battle, was captured by the enemy, and was still a prisoner of war in Libby Prison in Richmond when Herman and Allan Melville made their visit to the Virginia landscape still contested by the Armies of the Wilderness nearly a year later. One direct witness of the Battle of Aldie was A. Runge, a member of New York's Fourth Cavalry who made a watercolor sketch with this handwritten caption: “Cavalry Battle at Aldie, June 17, 1863, at which Colonel di Cesnola commanding the Fourth New York Cavalry was wounded and taken prisoner” (fig. 2).  

Runge’s watercolor sketch suggests the “green retreats of hills” in which Mosby’s troops were still “lodged” in Melville’s poem about his own “scout” toward Aldie when Cesnola was still in Libby Prison in April 1864. Runge’s sketch also gives us a glimpse into the kind of mounted warfare that Wouvermans had painted in A Skirmish of Cavalry in the mid-1640s, that J. B. Allen had reproduced in the engraving after that painting that Melville acquired sometime after 1840s, and that A. Runge had witnessed himself in the Skirmish of Cavalry during which Colonel Cesnola was wounded and captured in 1863.  

Runge’s watercolor was among Cesnola’s personal effects when he died in 1904. It is now preserved in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Cesnola served as director from 1879 until the year he died. In the Parting Thought that concludes this section after CAT 227, we will address various ways in which the lives of Melville the print collector and Cesnola the museum director converged and diverged between the inaugural exhibition of Metropolitan Museum in February 1872 and Melville’s death in September 1891.