Melville's Prints: The E. Barton Chapin, Jr., Family Collection

Melville’s Prints: The E. Burton Chupin, zyxw JK,Family Collection ROBERT K. WALLACE Northern Kentucky University t his death Herman Melvilleleft behind hundreds of prints and engravings in his personal collection of art. Arthur Stedman called attention Ato the print collection, as part of Melville’slibrary, in his New York Tribune obituary: “He was always a great reader, and was much interested in collecting engravings of the old masters, having a large library and a fine assortment of prints, those of Claude’s paintings being his favorite. zy ”1 Various writers since Stedman have made occasional, tantalizing references to the print collection (see Archival Box I), but only recently have scholars begun to catalog specific prints that Melville owned (Archival Box zyx 11). After T. Walter Herbert, Jr., and John D. Swartz documented four prints in the Osborne Collection at Southwestern University in 1985,I documented 291 prints in the Melville Memorial Room at the Berkshire Athenaeum in 1986. During the 1990s, I was able to catalog another print from the Mystic Seaport Museum, forty-four in the William Reese Collection, eight in the Priscilla Ambrose group, three in David Metcalf‘s collection, and one in a private collection in London. To those zyxwvu 352 prints, we can now add thirty-seven new prints from the E. Barton Chapin, Jr., family collection.2 These engraved art works provide important new insight into Melville’saesthetics, his collecting habits, and his literary art. The prints currently in the E. Barton Chapin, Jr., family collection have been preserved by Herman’s wife Elizabeth, their daughter Frances Melville Thomas, andJeannette Ogden Thomas (1892-1974), the youngest of Melville’s four granddaughters. Under her married name, Mrs. E. Barton Chapin, Thomas donated six of Melville’sprints to the Berkshire Athenaeum in 1960 (whose collection already included several prints bearing her initials among those donated by her eldest sister Eleanor Melville Metcalf in 1952). The rest of her print collection was divided between her sons E. Barton Chapin, Jr. (whose legacy is my focus here) and Melville Chapin (whose prints will be the subject of a future essay). “Bart”Chapin (1916-1998) was keenly interested in “HermanMelville’s Funeral,”October 1,1891,p. 14. 2 I am grateful to Stuart Frank of the Kendall Whaling Museum for informing me about the prints in this collection, putting me in touch with their owner(s), and sharing with me the results of his visit to the collection. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 5 R O B E R T zyxwvu K . W A L L A C E the prints that he had inherited from Melville’s collection. His wife Jane Chapin, their three children, and a grandchild are now preserving this artistic legacy within the family3 Melville’s prints are time capsules that take us back to the mind and imagination of the man who wrote the literary works we value so highly today. They give us direct access to visual images that informed him of the world and, in some cases, shaped his thought. Melville’sinterest in the visual arts spanned his entire career from Typee to Timoleon. His print collection reflects his life as a traveler, book collector, and writer, and it illustrates interrelations among these activities. As the inventory at the end of this essay shows, the thirtyseven prints in the Bart Chapin family collection are impressively eclectic in both subject matter and style. They include classicallandscapes after paintings by Nicholas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Gabriel Perelle; female subjects by Sebastiano del Piombo and Franqois Boucher; reproductions after Dutch old masters; various English subjects and scenes; literary illustrations after C. R. Leslie and Karl Nahl; and diverse Mediterranean scenes. These prints greatly enrich our knowledge of Melville’s knowledge of each of the above categories of art. They reproduce the work of seventeen artists he was not previously known to have collected, some of whom relate directly to his writing. Some prints are most striking for their aesthetic appeal, others more for their historical...