A Blue Hole, Jamaica

Born in Denmark and trained by his brother Anton in Copenhagen, Melbye spent most of his career working overseas, exhibiting landscapes painted in the Danish Antilles from 1849. He visited Los Llanos in Venezuela in 1850, met Pissarro on the island of St. Thomas and returned with him to Venezuela in 1852. Pissarro and Melbye went on sketching trips together from their base in Caracas, Pissarro leaving for France in August 1854 and Melbye remaining for nine years before heading for the United States. He took a studio with Frederic Edwin Church in New York in the 1860s, painted Niagara Falls and travelled with Church and his wife and a group of friends to Jamaica in the Spring of 1865. They returned to New York in the autumn, Church and Melbye working up Jamaican subjects in 1866 and 1867. In the late 1860s Melbye sailed for Shanghai where he appears to have remained in the Far East rest of his career, dying in Shanghai in 1896.

Melbye's work in Venezuela, the Caribbean and North America remained little known until the discovery of a large collection of drawings and oil sketches from his studio (originally left with Church in New York when he sailed for Shanghai) at Olana on the Hudson, Church's home. For Melbye's work from Olana see the essays by R.R. Brettell and K. Zukowski in the exhibition catalogue Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 1850-1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana, St. Thomas, 1996.