The Project and the Site

Robert K. Wallace and Samuel Otter, co-creators

Passage Herman Melville marked in copy of
William Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art he acquired in 1870

The goal of this project is to allow viewers to see, search, and savor the visual and intellectual value of 420 prints and engravings that Herman Melville acquired and preserved in his East 26th Street home in New York City between the late 1860s and his death in 1891. We can enjoy these prints today because they were preserved by his widow Elizabeth Shaw Melville until her death in 1906, and then by their daughters Elizabeth and Frances, and then by their granddaughters Eleanor, Frances, Katharine, and Jeannette far into the 20th century, when these same prints were then preserved by direct descendants of those granddaughters and by various institutions who continue to care for them today. 

This online site will enable viewers to see all the prints Melville is known to have collected, to appreciate the passion with which he acquired them, and to recognize the illumination they bring to his life, his writing, and his living legacy as an interdisciplinary intellect and global citizen. I am grateful to all the individuals and institutions who have given me access to the prints themselves and permission to reproduce them on this site; to those journals that have published my sequence of essays on the separate collections; to the successive generations of Melville scholars who have made archival retrieval of this kind possible and personally encouraged my own work; and especially to those individuals and institutions who have helped this project evolve from what would have been a expensive book for a limited audience into an online resource open to all. 

Our top priority in creating this site has been to convey the pictorial and imaginative essence of Melville's collection in the most accessible and expansive way. In addition to seeing, searching, and savoring the print collection that gave Melville himself so much pleasure, this digital site will enable the viewer to immediately compare any individual print with others having the same engraver, artist, subject, place of publication, date, genre, collector, or engraving technique. The pictorial gallery at the top of this page presents a sample image for each of our chapters (click on each image for Print Identification). In those chapters, we travel with Melville’s mind and eye from Ancient Greece and the Near East through to Ancient Rome and Modern Italy, from Three Centuries of French Painting to Flemish and Dutch Old Masters, and from German, British, and American artists and printmakers up through the 19th Century.  

Seeing all the prints from Melville’s collection will also enable the viewer to see his whole life whole. These prints help us to see that love of the visual arts was a continuous thread connecting the precocious, adventurous young man who published ten books of fiction between 1846 and 1857 with the more reclusive older author who published four books of poetry between 1866 and 1891. The nine-month voyage during which he explored Near Eastern cultures and Western European galleries in 1856-57 provided connections and associations between his fiction and his poetry, his travels and his home, and the printed page and the graphic image that enriched his imaginative life in a way that can continue to enrich our own today. 

We published the first chapter of MPCO (Ancient Greece and Near East, catalog entries 1-69) in August 2021. Chapter 2 (Ancient Rome and Modern Italy, CAT 70-120) was published in 2022 and Chapter 3 (Three Centuries of French Painting, CAT 121-184) in 2023. We are now publishing Chapter 4 (Flemish and Dutch Old Masters, CAT 185-229) in 2025. Clementine Ferrell and Emily Godfrey have been our undergraduate webmasters at Northern Kentucky University.

In June 2023 our project was featured (along with the Melville Electronic Library and Melville’s Marginalia Online) in the first special issue of Leviathan devoted to Digital Melville. Our three sites can all be accessed on the Digital Resources page of the Melville Society website: https://www.melvillesociety.org/digital-resources.

As subsequent chapters are completed, they will be added to the banner at the top of this page, where visitors are now able to "Browse by Melville's Writings."

Robert K. Wallace, Northern Kentucky University

Samuel Otter, University of California - Berkeley