Melville's Prints: the Gipsies
Melville's prints: The Gipsies
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Citation Wallace, Robert K. 1999. Melville's prints: The Gipsies. Harvard Library Bulletin 8 (4), Winter 1997: 34-36.
Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37363298
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Melville's Prints: The Gipsies
Robert K. Wallace
/\. print listed as missing in a recent essay on Herman Melville's print collection fib.as now been found. With the help of Priscilla Ambrose and Amalia Osborne Durham I am now able to identify the engraving that Frances Osborne, Melville's ROBERT K. WALLA CE is granddaughter, had listed as "The Gipsies" in a memorandum of items she had Regents' Professor at Northern inherited from his collection (Wallace, "Ambrose," p. 48, n. 32). Kentucky University. His essay on the prints in the Ambrose The Gipsies (figure 1) is after a painting and etching by Thomas Gainsborough Group appeared in the Spring also known as Wooded LAndscapewith Gipsiesround a Camp Fire (Hayes, no. 2). The 1995 issue of this journal. image was engraved by J.Wood in 1759 after an original etching by Gainsborough, now lost, dating from "about 1753-54." Gainsborough had based his etching on an original painting that "has never come to light," according to John Hayes, although "the first (unfinished) version of the picture, slashed by Gainsborough in a temper," has survived. In 1764 Wood's 1759 engraving was republished by J. Boydell as "a companion to Richard Wilson's LAke Nemi (then at Stourhead), also engraved by Wood" (Hayes, p. 41). Melville's copy of The Gipsies is from Boydell's 1764 republication. It can now be added to the inventory of other works from his collection:
Engraved and finished by J. Wood after painting and etching by T. Gainsborough. The Gipsies.Published by J. Boydell in Cheapside, London 1764.
This is the first image by Gainsborough that Melville is known to have owned. It is a significant addition to engravings he collected after other English artists including Richard Wilson, George Romney,John Flaxman,John Constable, Edwin Landseer, J. M. W. Turner, and George Cruikshank (see Wallace, "Berkshire," pp. 77-86). Among the eight engravings previously identified in the Ambrose Group, the human figures in the foreground of Gainsborough's The Gipsiesoffer an interesting contrast with those in the foreground of Richard Wilson's Evening, engraved by S. W. Reynolds in 1824 (Wallace, "Ambrose," no. 5). As an eighteenth-century engraving published by John Boydell in London, Gainsborough's wooded landscape joins three engravings of seascapes in the Ambrose Group. Melville's copy of Pierre Charles Canot' s A Brisk Gale after a painting by Willem Van de V elde the Younger was published by Boydell in 1765, a year after he published The Gipsies.Melville's copies of two engravings by Richard Earlom after Claude Lorrain, View efa Sea-Port duringa Sun-set and Embarkationef the Queen efSheba, were published by Boydell in 1774 and 1775 (Wallace, "Ambrose," nos. 8, 2, 1). In a copy of The Wondersef Engraving that Melville acquired in 187 5 (Sealts, no. 195), Georges Duplessis laments that "Thomas Gainsborough, a charming painter, Melville'sPrints: The Gipsies 35
Figure 1. Engraved and finished by]. Wood after painting and etching by T. Gainsborough. The Gipsies. Published by]. Boyde/I in Cheapside, London 1764. Collection of Mrs. John Durham. Photo courtesy of Harvard College Art i\1useums, gift of Belinda L. RandaU{rom the collection of John Witt Randall. HARVARD LIBRARY BULLETIN 36
whose works were deservedly successful during his life, had not the will or oppor- tunity to gather around him engravers to reproduce his works .... Unfortunately, only a few of Gainsborough's paintings have been engraved" (Duplessis, p. 198). Of those few engravings, we now know that Melville acquired at least one, one of the impressions that Boydell had republished from the engraving that J. Wood had made from the etching, now lost, that Gainsborough had made from the com- pleted painting, also lost, except in the uncompleted first version, slashed by the artist. How fragile is the history of Gainsborough's image in its successive manifesta- tions. Yet how tangible is the one impression that survives from Melville's collec- tion, now that it has resurfaced more than a century after his death in 1891. Melville's copy of Gainsborough's The Gipsieswas preserved first by his widow Elizabeth and then by their daughter Frances Thomas, by their grandaughter Frances Thomas Osborne, and by her son Henry Thomas Osborne. It now belongs to his daughter Amalia Osborne Durham, who is preserving it in London, the city in which the print was created so long ago.
WORKS CITED
Duplessis, Georges. The Wonders efEngraving. London: Low and Marston, 1871. Hayes, John. Gainsboroughas Printmaker.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Sealts, Merton M. Jr., Melville's Reading: Revised and EnlargedEdition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Wallace, Robert K. "Melville's Prints: The Ambrose Group." HarvardLibrary Bulletin n.s. 6 (Spring 1995): 13-50. ---. "Melville's Prints and Engravings at the Berkshire Athenaeum." Essays in Arts and Sciences15 Qune 1986): 59-90.