J. Outhwaite after Jan van der Heyden. The River-Bank

Melville’s print of The River-Bank by Jan van der Heyden, like his prints of The Battle Field and The Hay Field by Philip Wouvermans, reproduces a painting from the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace. Those three paintings each reflected the condition of north Holland at the time they were painted.  

The furious fighting in Wouvermans’ A Skirmish of Cavalry, painted in the mid-1640s, reflected the continuing effort of Dutch citizens to overthrow Spanish rule (CAT 224, fig. 1). The pastoral productivity of Wouvermans’ The Hayfield, painted in the 1660s, reflected harmony and prosperity resulting from the victory over the Spanish ratified by the Peace of Münster in 1648 (CAT 225, fig. 1). The suburban sophistication and ease of Jan van der Heyden’s A County House on the Vliet near Delft, painted around 1660, reflected the taste and wealth of the merchant class in major cities who were now able to extend their prosperity out along the river-banks of the surrounding countryside (fig. 1).  

Jean Jacques Outhwaite’s engraving of The River-Bank was published in London’s Art-Journal in March 1857, a month before G. Levy’s engraving afer Rembrandt’s “Noli me Tangere (our CAT 199). As the commentator noted, Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712) excelled as “a painter of architecture combined with landscape.” His “favorite subjects were small towns, and villages situated on the banks of rivers, or country houses, similarly placed.” In this case the country house on the riverbank appears to be one of those “suburban mansions . . . to which the wealthy burghers of Amsterdam were accustomed to resort” after the close of business (“The River-Bank,” p. 88).    

The painting is currently known as A Country House on the Vliet near Delft, but its exact location is uncertain. As Desmond Shaw-Taylor noted in his book on Dutch Houses van der Heyden often situated one of his meticulously detailed buildings within a generic, composite landscape. Among the generic elements here are “a navigable canal or river with a well-kept tow-path and a considerable volume of freight traffic.” And like many such country houses, this one shares the river-bank with “working farmhouses” on “plots of land extended into the flat, low-lying, fertile, reclaimed land” (p. 83). Melville's print of van der Heyden's River-bank, like his print of Wouvermans' Hay Field, is enhanced by quite a variety of human figures. Christopher White calls attention to “a huntsman and his dog on a road beside a canal.” And “a mother and her children are seated by the road.” And, “in the centre foreground, a barge moored to a landing-stage, where a woman receives a basket of washing from a man on the boat; beside it, another barge, with several more coming down the river” (p. 49). 

In van der Heyden’s landscapes, as in those of Wouvermans, the minute attention to objects and action on the ground is enhanced by “the beauty of his skies, whether clouded or serene, or illumined by sunshine,” especially as “the light, floating silvery vapour relieves the intensity of the azure.” In the commentary that accompanied The River-Bank in The Art-Journal, “all the excellencies” of van der Heyden’s style “are seen the picture here engraved. The colouring is beautifully transparent and silvery;  the various objects are pencillled with the utmost delicacy and minuteness, while the trees show less formality and stiffness than are usual in this painter,” suggesting that the view is evidently copied from nature” (p. 88). For Shaw-Taylor, writing in 2010, “the vivid naturalism of the scene, with its matter-of-fact viewpoint, recording a public thoroughfare with no deference to the country house . . . remarkably anticipates the landscapes of the Impressionists” (p. 82). 

A second painting by van der Heyden at Buckingham Palace depicts The South-West Approach to Veere with the Groote Kerk (c. 1665-66). Veere, a town in Zeeland, is the subject of one of Melville’s most beautiful architectural prints, Pieter Devel’s 1711 engraving of the Town Hall of Veere (our CAT 229). Van der Heyden was known even more for his urban than for his countryside paintings, and this painting, too, combines meticulous detail with topographical freedom (fig. 2 below). “The Groote Kerk is entirely accurate, as is the general effect of brick fortifications, and drawbridges,” but “the palace to the right and the circuit of high ground leading from it towards what appears to be a Roman aqueduct are entirely imaginary” (“The South-West Approach”). 

Van der Heyden lived most of his working life in Amsterdam and he knew the architecture of the city especially well. In 1669. he was appointed “Overseer and Director of the Lanterns Lit by Night” after proposing “a system of street lighting which would prevent burgleries and people falling into the canals in the dark.” In 1673, he and his brother Nicholas were named “Supervisors of the City Fire Pumps” after inventing “a two-handed pump which is the origin of the fire engine” (“The South-West Approach”). In acquiring prints after van der Heyden’s depiction of a country house on a Dutch river-bank and Devel’s depiction of the town hall of Veere, Melville was employing the antiquarian eye through which the streets of Amsterdam appeared to him in 1857 “like long lines of old fashioned frontispieces in old folios & old quartos” (NN J 127).   

Jan van der Heyden the painter, who died in Amsterdam in 1712, does not seem to have been related to Jacob van der Heyden the engraver, who died in Brussels in 1636. Melville collected ten small, rectangular engravings by Jacob van der Heyden that have been cut from David Sudermann's quasi-pietistic emblem book devoted to the Song of Solomon published in Frankfurt in 1622 (see our CAT 50-59).