CLAUDE LORRAIN

In this early work by Claude a harbour scene, bathed in early morning or evening light and animated by only a few figures, is seen from a slightly elevated viewpoint.

Claude Lorrain drew the sum of Italian and northern European landscape painting, and on this basis developed the High Baroque ideal landscape par excellence. The secret of the special effect of depth in his paintings lies in his perfection of proportions and perspective. Not even his most talented imitators, of whom there would be myriads in Europe and America in the centuries to come, were able to match it. For all the beauty of his works, however, we should not forget to note their original social function. The palaces of the secular and ecclesiastical elites of the period, not only in Rome, were furnished with an almost unimaginable luxury. The festival held by Philippe d’Aglie in about 1637 in Rivoli, for instance, presented panorama views of the provinces of Savoy Piedmont, Turin and Montferrat, each in its own room. The dining table was mounted on casters and pushed, complete with diners, from room to room. The party banqueted and danced among the landscapes, and as the people (rather than the setting) were portable, they could imagine they were traveling through the countryside.

Art formed the setting for a society that reveled in pomp and display. Its tendency to the theatrical is also evident in Claude’s paintings. To hold their own in opulent surroundings, they needed effective composition and poetic coloration. This is particularly evident in his stagelike views of harbours, except that they far surpass any theater set in terms of their stupendous effects of illumination and space. Seaport at Sunrise, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, is a prime example. In the midst of imaginative scenery mundane activities like the transport of bales of goods by boat are, as it were, projected back into the Arcadian idylls of ancient Greece and Rome.

This painting is the latest of the three existing versions of the subject.

Compared with Poussin, Claude had a relative lack of interest in his subject-matter, and his attitude in this respect was much more akin to that of his contemporaries. This was that the subject should be obvious to those who looked for it but that it should not spoil the viewer’s appreciation of the beauty of the landscape. From the 1640s onwards Claude invented a perfect compromise between subject and landscape: instead of repeating his favourite earlier subjects such as the Flight into Egypt (which was used merely as a vehicle for a landscape) he began to use the poetry of Virgil as a major source of his subject-matter.

Unlike Poussin, who tried to imitate his source in as accurate a manner as possible, Claude used the poetry as a source of general inspiration for his pictures, which remained landscapes first and foremost. Virgil’s pastoral poetry, the Eclogues and the Georgics, had already been used by Claude in a generalized way for his many scenes of shepherds resting, dancing or simply minding their flocks in an ideal landscape. The almost wistful verse of Virgil could be translated into paint by Claude without any pedantic references to specific passages, and without arousing any argument over the precise passage illustrated.

The story depicted in the painting is from Virgil’s Aeneid (4:362-392). The lovers, Dido and Aeneas, passed a whole winter in each other’s company, until Aeneas was suddenly visited by Mercury, the messenger of the gods, with sharp orders from Jupiter to be on his way. He took his leave amid scenes of passionate pleading, vituperation and tears. When Aeneas had departed Dido built a funeral pyre in the palace and slew herself on it, using her lovers sword.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 186).

Henry Purcell (c. 1659-1695), the English composer and organist, composed an opera from the story of Dido and Aeneas.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, Dido’s Farewell

The subject of this painting is taken from Greek mythology. Admetus was famed for his hospitality and justice. When Apollo was sentenced to a year of servitude to a mortal as punishment for killing the Cyclops, the god chose Admetus’ home and became his herdsman. Apollo was so impressed by Admetus’ treatment that the god made all the cows bear twins.

This composition consists of two masses of trees and an Etruscan town all rising like blocks from a composition primarily planned on the horizontal plane.

In the last decade of his life, Claude concentrated on a limited number of themes, many of them from Virgil’s Aeneid. The Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helion (Parnassus) of 1680 in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is a good example of his use of idyllic mythology during his last years. His technique remained as refined as in his earlier years, but his compositions often lost the earlier sense of perfect balance in the trees of different sizes and densities on each side of the picture. Sometimes, as in the Boston picture, the whole appears rather awkward, especially in reproductions which tend to emphasize the patterns made by the landscape against the sky. In front of the original, however, these awkwardnesses disappear because one becomes aware that the artist is concentrating entirely on atmosphere, to the exclusion of everything else.

The mythological story depicted on the picture is the following.

Apollo, as the God of Poetry and Music (in this role named Apollo Musagetes), dwells on Mount Parnassus, accompanied by the muses, the goddesses of poetic inspiration and the creative arts in general. The running brook is the Castilian spring, which, like another, the Pierian, was a source of inspiration and learning where we are advised to drink deep.

The painting was executed for the Principe Colonna, and was in the family collection until at least 1783. It is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 193).

The painting is signed and dated: CLAVDE GILLE IVRI/ROMAE 1667.

There are in all five painted versions of this subject by Claude dating from four different decades. The earliest is dated 1634 (Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum), followed by the second, dated 1647 (on loan to Utrecht, Centraal Museum), a third dated 1655 (Moscow, Pushkin Museum) and a fourth of 1658 (private collection). The version in the Royal Collection, dated 1667, is the last in the series and in many ways marks the climax of the artist’s treatment of the theme. This is admirably reflected in its heightened poetic sensibility and the sophisticated level of technical skills. Of the various compositions, that of 1634 is also recorded in an etching, while the others are included in Claude’s Liber Veritatis (LV 111, 136 and 144), which served as an official drawn record made by the artist himself of his painted compositions dating from 1637 onwards.

While the basic features of the design and iconography were established in the Fort Worth painting, changes or differences in emphasis occur in the others as Claude modified his style. It is also true to say that the version in Utrecht served as the basis for the later renderings, particularly in the greater spaciousness of the setting. There is a closer compositional affinity, however, between the painting in Moscow and the present picture, although small alterations in scale and in the number of figures and animals are apparent. For the painting in the Royal Collection Claude most probably referred back to the drawing of the Moscow version made for the Liber Veritatis (LV 136), although the picture itself remained in Rome in the collection of Fabio Chigi (1599-1667), who was elected Pope as Alexander VII in 1655 and was one of the artist’s most important patrons.

There is circumstantial evidence in the form of an inscription made by a later hand on the back of the drawing (LV 136) that the painting in the Royal Collection was made for Philippe de Graveron. An autograph drawing dated 1670, not from the Liber Veritatis, after the present painting is in the British Museum, London.

The source for the story of the Rape of Europa is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (II, 833-75). Jupiter, enamoured with Europa, the daughter of Agenor, changes himself into a white bull and mingles with the herd of cattle on the seashore where Europa and her maidens linger. Attracted by the beauty of the bull and not aware of Jupiter’s transformation, Europa climbs onto its back and is abducted, eventually being carried out to sea. The description in Ovid is immensely poetic and Claude, by this time well versed in mythology and fully practised in its depiction, successfully expresses the beauty of the text in paint. The mood of the picture is established principally by the chief compositional features of trees, coastline, vessels and fortification judiciously placed within the picture space. The wide spatial intervals create a feeling of calm while quicker rhythms required for the narrative are concentrated in the foreground. The tonal values help to create an atmosphere charged with poetic feeling while the soft breeze wafting from the water is almost palpable. The overall beauty of the painting is enhanced by a number of felicitous details, both in terms of colour and of observation, in which Claude’s painting matches Ovid’s poetry. The care lavished on the draperies, the flowers and garlands, the waves lapping the sides of the vessels, and the down along the flanks of the cattle testify to the precision of Claude’s art in creating a world that oscillates between quotidian experience and arcadian bliss.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 49).

Claude Lorrain, sometimes also known simply as Claude, perfected the creation of ideal landscapes, placed in a golden classical antiquity of harmonious architecture, weather, landscape and society. This work so typical of his style was commissioned by Philip IV, King of Spain, for the decoration of one of the galleries in the Buen Retiro Palace. The act of embarkation is transformed by the theatrical setting into an act of Roman dignity, a heroic venture, a glorious example to posterity.

Princess Erminia was a character in the epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso. In this tale she falls in love with the Christian knight Tancred, and betrays her people to aid him. Once she discovers that Tancred is in love with Clorinde, however, she returns to join the Muslims. She subsequently steals Clorinde’s armor then joins a group of shepherds.

In his paintings Claude creates a loose space, almost always leading the eye to infinity at some point, and often with a wide line of horizon. This space is filled with atmosphere which penetrates the trees standing in it and forms the continuum of the picture. Recession is established often without the use of linear perspective, by the subtle degradation of colour, usually in objects such as trees which have no sharp outline. Moreover, these objects may be disposed on a horizontal plane, as are, for instance, the trees covering the valley in the Erminia, in which the eye is led from the river to the extreme distance simply by the change in colour of the groves.

This small painting is one of the few oil paintings known by Claude today that can be regarded as studies from nature. Otherwise Claude’s studies of nature are recorded exclusively in drawings.

This landscape is one of the few oil paintings known by Claude today that can be regarded as studies from nature. Otherwise Claude’s studies of nature are recorded exclusively in drawings.

This drawing corresponds to the painting included in Liber Veritatis (LV 19), dated 1637 (Private Collection, England). Another painting of 1643 in the Royal Collection, Windsor, is an autograph replica of the earlier work, although there are considerable differences between the two compositions. The round tower on the left of the earlier composition has been moved to the right, closer to the buildings seen on the shore, where it has been paired with another tower of similar design. The left edge of the later composition is dominated by two ships, balanced at the right edge by two porticoes instead of one. The man lying asleep in the foreground, who does not occur in LV 19 but is introduced into the painting of 1637, is retained in the later painting although the pose is reversed.

The composition is in some respects related to a drawing (LV 19) in Claude’s Liber Veritatis, a drawn record kept by the artist himself of his finished paintings. The picture which LV 19 actually records is dated 1637 (Private collection, England). Although the present painting of 1643 is best described as an autograph replica of the earlier work, there are considerable differences between the two compositions. The round tower on the left of the earlier composition has been moved to the right, closer to the buildings seen on the shore, where it has been paired with another tower of similar design. The left edge of the later composition is dominated by two ships, balanced at the right edge by two porticoes instead of one. The man lying asleep in the foreground, who does not occur in LV 19 but is introduced into the painting of 1637, is retained in the present painting although the pose is reversed.

The connections - albeit inexact - between this Harbour Scene and LV 19 have resulted in the painting being dated to 1637, but cleaning in 1969 confirmed the authenticity of the date of 1643. Once this was established the stylistic distinctions evident between works of the 1630s and the 1640s could be confirmed. The deep ultramarine tone of the water, the overall warmth of colour, and the more solid drawing of the figures, which, as a result, have a greater feeling of corporeality, are characteristic of the later decade. Comparison with the seaport scenes in the collections of the Duke of Northumberland and the Marquess of Bute, dating from 1637 and 1638 respectively, or with the rendering in Florence (Uffizi), also of 1638, reinforces these stylistic shifts. The picture in the Royal Collection was painted in the same year as Coast View with Mercury and Aglauros (Rome, Pallavicini collection) and Coast View with the Trojan Women setting Fire to their Fleet (New York, Metropolitan Museum). Three similar harbour scenes in the National Gallery, London, date from the 1640s and are comparable in style: Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula, Seaport of 1644, and Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba of 1648 - this last an inspiration to J. M. W. Turner.

Harbour scenes occur frequently throughout Claude’s oeuvre. Usually depicted at sunset and populated by a full cast of staffage figures, busying themselves by loading and unloading ships or simply idling the day away in conversation, these compositions and the mood they created found favour with British collectors and were emulated by British artists. The only firmly identifiable building in the present picture is the monumental gateway on the right next to the round tower. This is based on the Arcus Argentarium (Arch of the Silversmiths), dating from the third century AD at San Giorgio in Velabro, Rome, although it is seen in reverse and detached from the church. A view of this arch and the church occurs in an early drawing by Claude at Windsor Castle.

Most of Claude’s paintings were conceived in complementary pairs. This was presumably also true of the landscape with accessory biblical scene illustrated here (one of the artist’s rare vertical-format works). It was executed for one of his most important patrons, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, chief field marshal of the Kingdom of Naples and one of the most brilliant figures in Roman society of the day.

As in all of his views, Lorrain based this imagined rather than depicted landscape on an idealized distance. In the foreground and middle ground we see signs of cultural life - pastoral, mythological, occasionally biblical scenes, temples, architecture - which lead the eye to a far-off realm of yearning. At the same time, the artist stages the transcending power of light.

In this imaginary landscape the subject of the Flight into Egypt is barely noticeable, and simply serves as an excuse for a landscape bathed with the golden light of dusk, with orange-tinted skies - yielding to an intense blue at the top - and a light mist which envelops everything and softens all the outlines.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 67).

The painting is signed and dated: Claude in. f. Romae 1642. The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 64).

A shepherd-couple are placed in the foreground of this southern landscape. The woman is seated on a rock and is listening to the shepherd playing the shawm. To the right of the picture is a tent supported by a tree, and on the left a stone bridge leads to a ruined Roman temple. In the background the open sea is half-obscured by the mist of a warm summer’s day.

The painter, whose real name was Claude Gell�e, was a native of Lorraine. When he first arrived in Rome, he worked as a pastrycook, then as assistant to the landscape painter Agostino Tassi, whom he helped with decorative work. Not much is known about his early career. It was only in his thirties that he began to acquire stature and reputation as an artist in his own right. The German painter-biographer Joachim von Sandrart, reporting on his visit to Rome (1629-35), writes that Claude was determined ‘to become familiar with nature in all its forms, and would spend whole days and late into the night in the fields, so that he learned how to convey most naturally the flush of day, the rising and setting of the sun …’.

Characteristic features of Claude’s art are the subtle moods of the landscape and the variation in the seascape with the changing seasons. People are unimportant in his pictures; the painter regarded them only as a means of lending animation to his landscapes and as a rule he did not even paint them himself. In the 1630s he started a book which he gradually filled with pen-and-ink drawings of almost 200 of his own pictures; although it does not comprise his entire oeuvre, it is nevertheless a unique documentary record of his artistic creations. The book is preserved today in the British Museum under the title Liber Veritatis; in it the Berlin landscape features on p. 64, and according to a note written on the verso, the work was commissioned by a patron in Paris.

This picture is recorded as having been in English private ownership in the early eighteenth century: until 1722 it was in the possession of the Duke of Portland, who sold it to the Earl of Scarbrough. About 1818 it passed into the possession of Count Pourtal�s and from him, in 1865, into the collection of the Marquis de la Ganay, from whom Bode bought it in 1881 for the Berlin Gallery.

This small landscape depicts a shepherd boy playing the flute near a river, sitting with his flock.

The painting is signed: CLAVDE GELEE IVEF ROMA 1657 (ivef = invenit et fecit).

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 179).

In the last ten years of his life Claude painted six stories of Aeneas, hero of Virgil’s Aeneid - the Latin epic describing the legendary origins of Rome. The theme seems to have been suggested by Claude himself. He chose scenes which had never been illustrated before; they do not form a series, nor were they painted in the order in which they appear in the Aeneid. As if echoing Virgil’s ‘I am that man who in times past tuned my song on the slender reed [of pastoral poetry]’, the painter turned, at the age of 68, to sing the voyages of the survivor ‘fated to be an exile…the first to sail from the land of Troy and reach Italy’. These six Aeneas pictures, of which Aeneas at Delos is the first, represent Claude’s most personal achievement, attaining a nobility of style visually equivalent to the grandeur of Virgil’s poem.

Throughout the 1640s and 1650s Claude had often illustrated Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it may be through the Metamorphoses that his interest in Aeneas’ adventures was first aroused. In Book XIII Ovid relates the hero’s flight from burning Troy; Claude’s painting is based more closely on this passage than on Virgil’s description in Book III of the Aeneid. Ovid tells how - taking with him sacred images of the gods, his father Anchises (the bearded man in blue) and his son Ascanius (the child on the right) Aeneas (in short red cloak):

set sail…and…reached with his friends the city of Apollo [Delos]. Anius [in white on the left], who ruled over men as king and served the sun god as his priest, received him in the temple and his home. He showed his city, the new-erected shrines and the two sacred trees [olive and palm] to which Latona had once clung when she gave birth to her children [Diana and Apollo].

The stone relief atop the portico in the foreground represents Diana and Apollo slaying the giant Tityus, who tried to ravish their mother.

This is one of the most evocative pictures ever painted. The figures, elongated perhaps in the belief that the ancients were taller than we, are dwarfed by the sacred trees and the majestic buildings. Apollo’s round temple recreates the original appearance of the Pantheon, reminding us of the Delian oracle’s prophecy of Rome’s future splendour. Meditation on time is at the very heart of the painting. A dual longing, for both the Trojan past and Aeneas’ future as founder of Rome, is embedded in the perspectival construction. The projecting lines of the architecture meet at the level of the horizon to the left of the canvas, while the lines of the road converge to the right.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 92).

The subject of this painting is taken from Greek mythology. Admetus was famed for his hospitality and justice. When Apollo was sentenced to a year of servitude to a mortal as punishment for killing the Cyclops, the god chose Admetus’ home and became his herdsman. Apollo was so impressed by Admetus’ treatment that the god made all the cows bear twins.

Apollo was sent by his father Jupiter to serve king Admetus as a shepherd, a punishment for killing the Cyclopes, Jupiter’s armourers. This pastoral Apollo sits under a tree and is playing his lyre while sheep browse in a meadow. He is also a herdsman watching over cattle somewhat inattentively, since Mercury succeeds in stealing them unobserved.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the Cumaean sibyl recounts how Apollo, trying to gain her love, offered anything her heart desired. So, forgetting how quickly youth passes, she picked up a handful of sand and asked the god to give her as many days as there were grains of sand in her palm. Claude sets this melancholic subject among overgrown ancient ruins. Thus, after thoughts of the perishability of human beings and their creations, the viewer can find consolation in contemplating the happy eternity of nature.

Claude’s very last picture, the Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia is one of Claude’s purest inspirations from the poetry of Virgil.

In the painting the yellows have faded completely, leaving a bluish tinge over the whole, and the entire surface has been abraded. As a result the picture has an unnatural and ghostly feeling. The composition is one of Claude’s most calculated, with trees, distant landscape and figures in total harmony. The Deruet-like figures are more.prominent than usual, with their bright blues and reds. The story is a tragic one: Ascanius accidentally shoots the stag of Sylvia, which unleashes a brutal war of revenge. It is fitting that Claude should have ended his career on this theme without depicting brutality, as it sums up his gentleness of temperament as an artist.

The painting was executed for the Principe Colonna and was still in the collection in 1783.

Cephalus and Procris in Greek mythology is a young couple, newly married, whose love was destined to end in tragedy.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 91).

In the 1640s Claude produced many of his most ambitious pictures, such as the two versions of the Landscape with Dancing Figures (sometimes called The Mill) in the Galleria Doria in Rome and the National Gallery, London (called The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca). They are wide in scale and the atmosphere is of broad daylight. There is a complete balance between careful observation of the reality of the Roman Campagna and the need to produce an organized composition. Unfortunately both versions of the picture suffer from a problem afflicting a number of Claude’s works, the darkening of the greens in the trees. This gives them a much greater solidity than the artist intended. Moreover, in Claude’s later pictures there is also sometimes a fading out of the fugitive yellows he used, which gives the pictures a much stronger bluish hue than he intended.

Painted in 1648, these two pictures sum up Claude s mature art. He had arrived at this maturity by degrees, almost imperceptibly, refining and perfecting his technique. He had for many years been drawing from nature almost obsessively, and several hundred of his sensitive and often atmospheric drawings survive. He was therefore able to combine the more naturalistic approach seen in the Ponte Molle of 1645 with an increasing desire to turn the landscape into an idealized world. He had tried dramatic atmosphere in some of his early compositions, and had succeeded with direct sunlight but had not pursued it; but he developed in his later years the soft and subtle light effects which were the most difficult of all to achieve convincingly. As he grew older Claude became even more meticulous, and his pictures never acquired the looseness sometimes seen in the works of painters in their old age, even Poussin.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 113).

In the 1640s Claude produced many of his most ambitious pictures, such as the two versions of the Landscape with Dancing Figures (sometimes called The Mill) in the Galleria Doria in Rome and the National Gallery, London (called The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca). They are wide in scale and the atmosphere is of broad daylight. There is a complete balance between careful observation of the reality of the Roman Campagna and the need to produce an organized composition. Unfortunately both versions of the picture suffer from a problem afflicting a number of Claude’s works, the darkening of the greens in the trees. This gives them a much greater solidity than the artist intended. Moreover, in Claude’s later pictures there is also sometimes a fading out of the fugitive yellows he used, which gives the pictures a much stronger bluish hue than he intended.

Painted in 1648, these two pictures sum up Claude s mature art. He had arrived at this maturity by degrees, almost imperceptibly, refining and perfecting his technique. He had for many years been drawing from nature almost obsessively, and several hundred of his sensitive and often atmospheric drawings survive. He was therefore able to combine the more naturalistic approach seen in the Ponte Molle of 1645 with an increasing desire to turn the landscape into an idealized world. He had tried dramatic atmosphere in some of his early compositions, and had succeeded with direct sunlight but had not pursued it; but he developed in his later years the soft and subtle light effects which were the most difficult of all to achieve convincingly. As he grew older Claude became even more meticulous, and his pictures never acquired the looseness sometimes seen in the works of painters in their old age, even Poussin.

The painting was executed for Prince Pamphilj and it is by descent in the Doria Pamphilj family.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 113).

The sunny and perfectly balanced composition, with its delicate colours, captures all the freshness of springtime. The intention behind the picture seems not so much to have been to represent the varied activities of the small figures dancing and enjoying themselves in the foreground, immersed in this luminous and crystalline atmosphere, as to produce an imaginary view that would create the impression of a higher reality, a perfect world that is more harmonious and balanced than the real one.

On returning to Canaan, Jacob, who feared his elder brother Esau’s vengeance, sent his servants ahead with a peace offering. That night an angel came to him, and they wrestled until daybreak. By remaining undefeated, Jacob earned God’s blessing and a new name, Israel. Claude incorporated this subject into one of his few night scenes, linking the first rays of the morning sun with the favourable outcome of this turning point in the biblical story.

Although the majority of Claude’s landscapes incorporated biblical, mythological, or genre scenes, his main theme was transformations of light; indeed, many of his series are devoted to times of day. Nature was his passion, as demonstrated not only by his superb sketches made on location, but also by his practice, highly unusual for the 17th century, of mixing paints while watching a sunrise or sunset, to be used later in the studio.

This is an early work of the artist, probably from about 1630 before he began the Liber Veritatis.

Claude’s earliest surviving pictures have usually been dated to around 1630, although he did not begin to keep accurate records until the mid-1630s. By this time he was already mature, and so it is from the evidence supplied by the undated pictures that his first hesitant steps have to be reconstructed. The fact that he developed so rapidly from his first unpromising topographical scenes to become the virtual inventor of the atmospheric and poetical landscape is evidence of his genius. In the early pictures, considerable reference is made to a wide variety of painters, all of them landscapists. By about 1630 an enormous amount of landscape painting was going on in Rome, soon to be increased by the innovations of Poussin and Dughet. Claude therefore had to contend with many other artists working in mature styles, either influencing or ignoring one another. He drew almost casually from this varied background, now leaning on one, now on another, and then discarding them all, to achieve total self-confidence by the time he was thirty-five.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 194).

This is a late work of the artist. He placed the Noli me tangere scene (the meeting of Christ and Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection) into a wide landscape depicting Jerusalem in the background and the Golgotha at the right.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 117).

The painting, also called The Ford, is a pendant to Ulysses Returns Chryseis her Father.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Cristoph Willibald Gluck: Paride ed Elena, Paris’ aria

The Flight into Egypt appears in the background to the left, framed by a group of trees. Claude was fond of this subject, yet he rarely approached it in such a discreet manner. The holy family, watched over by an angel, seem to be there almost by chance amid this classically inspired jewel-box of a landscape. The overall effect recalls a pastoral scene from Virgil, which brings us to the three figures in Antique attire in the foreground: a shepherd playing a pipe, a seated washerwoman, and to the right a woman collecting water from a spring.

A herd of cattle and goats approaches them to quench their thirst in the river. Everything unites to convey a vision of a harmonious world with a lively river, the font of life, flowing through its heart. Although the work is lent precision by the detailing of the different species of tree, it is the light that consolidates the whole: the clarity of the breaking day unfolding from the left — as always Claude has painted the early morning — brings the forms out of the shade and submerges the distance in a milky haze.

The painting is signed as “Clavde ivef” (ivef = invenit et fecit).

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 107).

Like Nicolas Poussin, Claude Gell�e, a native of Lorraine, went to Italy while still young and lived and worked in Rome as an honoured member of the artists’ colony. Italian painters being on the whole not greatly attracted towards the painting of pure landscapes, the genre was first explored in the North and was introduced into Italy by painters from the Netherlands, Germany and France. The French painters, Poussin, Claude and Poussin’s nephew, Gaspard Dughet, created a specific kind of landscape, known as the ‘ideal landscape’, introducing mythological or legendary figures and often creating a pleasing harmony by blending elements of reality with antique ruins or classical buildings. To all this Claude added a specific quality of his own - a magic evocation of mood, an exquisite shading of atmospheric elements and subtlety of lighting.

The painting in Budapest depicts a villa in the country near Rome, the house and the landscape bathed in the gentle light of the late afternoon sun; in the foreground, where the shadows have already lengthened, the surface of the water reflects the figures of the shepherd and his flock. The drawing for this picture is in the Duke of Devonshire’s collection at Chatsworth; the inscription on the back of the drawing tells us that the picture was painted for Prince Pamphilj, probably some time in the 1640s.

The artist painted another version at about the same time, it is in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 13 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock) D 965

The picture, painted for a Parisian collector, is one of the rare works of Claude’s maturity that depict and identifiable site.

The best example of Claude’s direct response to nature, although not topographically accurate, is the Landscape with Shepherds - the Ponte Molle of 1645 in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Each element in the picture is perfectly observed from nature; nothing is obviously artificial, but Claude arranged these elements - cabbage-like plants on the ground, classical ruins, a large pine tree - in a way which later generations came to regard as picturesque. To those unfamiliar with the actual landscape he painted, Claude’s pictures seem even more artificial than they are. The Roman Campagna has changed little since the seventeenth century, especially the area around Tivoli; the terrain is dotted with the ruins of classical antiquity and there are numerous scattered pine trees which seem, especially when one is walking through them, to take on a `Claudian’ aspect when juxtaposed with ruins. The light is marvelously clear, with the sky changing from blue to yellow in the morning and evening. Claude achieved a near perfect depiction of this atmosphere in the Birmingham picture : instead of the brilliant sunshine of the St Ursula there is a soft glow, in which the artist produces an almost milky light. He manages to capture atmosphere not by blurring the edges of each object depicted but by juxtaposing infinitesimal gradations of tone without losing the slightest detail. In all Claude’s mature landscapes, and signally in this one, there is a sense of infinite distance in which the spectator can wander at will.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 90).

This drawing is a record of a painting, now in Mus�e du Louvre, Paris, from the Liber Veritatis (no. 15). It depicts a figure sitting beneath a tree in the foreground, sheep, cow and goats nearby, further trees beyond, and a pond in the mid-distance.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 47).

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: Moses, Moses’ Prayer

This painting belongs to the series of the Four Times of the Day. It is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 154).

This landscape, with its winding river, elegant trees, and grand castle, is an idealized vision of the countryside near Rome, where Claude spent most of his career. All of the artist’s landscapes include narrative subjects: in this case, Jacob’s journey to the land of Canaan. The tiny camels on the right hint at the biblical story, but the painting is essentially a celebration of nature at its most poetic.

Claude Gell�e, known as Lorrain, was born near Nancy in France. From 1613, however, he is recorded in Rome, where he spent most of his career, which he dedicated to the painting of landscapes. Although landscapes were starting to assume some autonomy a full century earlier, in the works of the Venetian school and above all Giorgione, Lorrain nevertheless represents one of Italy’s earliest and most important exponents of landscape painting as an independent genre. Starting from the classicist tradition, he elaborated an idealized landscape which would give rise to a whole school and which can be considered close to the art of Nicolas Poussin.

This painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 71).

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 96).

Perhaps the most beautiful of Claude’s pictures are those in which he brings in the sea, whose effects he was able to study during the journey he made to Naples. The sea, for Claude, was a poetic element multiplying light; and he edged it with dream palaces, often motivating his pictures by scenes of embarkation or landing taken from history or religion.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 13 minutes):

Claudio Monteverdi: Il ritorno d’Ulisse, Act I, Duet of Odysseus and Pallas Athene

The painting was executed in Rome for Cardinal Poli. It depicts the scene when Ursula (with a red-cross flag and an arrow symbolizing her future martyrdom) and her retinue depart for Cologne.

This picture is entirely concerned with the phenomenon of light; the golden tone fills the whole surface and envelops each of the individual elements. The actual subject, St Ursula embarking with her retinue of virgins, seems lost in this paean of praise for the sun, which shines directly at the spectator from the middle of the canvas. In this picture Claude perfectly observed an effect which eluded most painters before the nineteenth century - the convincing depiction of direct sunlight. He was the first artist ever to dare the daunting task of depicting a direct view into the sun. Few of Claude’s pictures go as far as this one, as he usually preferred to portray the softer light of early morning or late evening.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 54).

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 28).

An angel guides Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus on their flight from Bethlehem to Egypt to escape King Herod’s persecution. The figures are shown resting near a group of palm trees - an allusion to their destination.

The French artist Claude Lorrain spent most of his life in Rome, painting idyllic landscapes adapted from views of the surrounding countryside. This is the only known panel painting by the artist to have survived.

Claude Lorrain arrived in Rome probably in 1617. After his first, youthful works, his style matured, and he began his Ports series. However, he painted only one port with the Capitoline. This work was thus a pictorial reverie in which the Capitoline - and all it represents - became part of an imaginary maritime scene. Nevertheless, the painted architecture is unquestionably the Capitoline and not one of vaguely classicising Palladian or Raphaelesque images found on so many canvases of the era. Claude chose that structure as an unmistakable sign of the centrality of Rome ‘caput mundi’, a city that is also the heart of Christianity.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 114).

When Claude Gell�e arrived as a boy in Rome from his native Lorraine, perhaps to serve as a pastry cook, landscape painting was already a recognised speciality. Claude, however, was to surpass all previous practitioners. His poetic reinventions of a Golden Age, appealing to a cultivated aristocratic clientele, were assembled in the studio from drawings made out of doors in Rome and the surrounding countryside and in the Bay of Naples. The German painter Sandrart, who accompanied him on sketching trips, described his procedures:

[Claude]…only painted, on a small scale, the view from the middle to the greatest distance, fading away towards the horizon and the sky… [he is an example to all] of how one can order a landscape with clarity, observe the horizon and make everything diminish towards it, hold the colouring in proportion with the depth, each time represent recognisably the time of day or the hour, bring everything together in correct harmony by accentuating strongly the front and shading off the back in proportion…

Claude’s influence indeed became all-pervasive, most of all in eighteenth-century England, where it affected not only painting and collecting but the very ways in which real landscape was viewed and artificial parkland constructed.

Like many of Claude’s pictures, the Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba was conceived as one of a pair; its companion, the Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (‘The Mill’), is also at the National Gallery. They were commissioned by Camillo Pamphilj, nephew of Pope Innocent X. Before the exceptionally large canvases had been completed, Pamphilj renounced his cardinal’s hat to marry and was expelled from Rome in disgrace; the paintings were finished for the Duc de Bouillon, French general of the papal armies. Both relate (through inscriptions, our only clues to their subjects) to stories from the Old Testament - thought at the time to be especially suitable for the pictorial decoration of cardinals’ palaces - on the theme of love, or esteem, between men and women, and recounting fateful journeys. While most contemporary churchmen would have interpreted the tales as symbolic of Christ’s union with the Church, Pamphilj may have wished to refer covertly to his own love for Olimpia Aldobrandini.

Claude follows his usual method of simultaneously harmonising and contrasting the two pictures: the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah is a landscape in late summer afternoon, the Embarkation a coastal view, depicted in early morning light like all of Claude’s Embarkations. The Queen of Sheba’s land journey ‘with camels…and very much gold’ to visit King Solomon (1 Kings 10:1-2) is transformed into the viewer’s own imaginary voyage, leaving harbour to sail on the open sea towards the light. (The queen, a small figure in red, descends the stairs to be rowed out to her vessel moored on the horizon.)

Including the sun within a painting was Claude’s greatest early innovation. Exactly half-way up the canvas in this stateliest of his seaport compositions, it is the basis of its pictorial unity, all the colours and tones adjusted in relation to it Claude’s palm and finger prints can be seen in many places in the sky where he smoothed transitions from one passage to the next. The boy sprawling on the quay-side shields his eyes from its dazzle, and its rays gild the rounded edges of the fluted column and Corinthian capital beside him.

This composition shows the state of the Roman Forum in the early seventeenth century, with many of the famous monuments half buried by debris.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 9).

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 63).

A pair of landscapes, the Expulsion of Hagar and the Landscape with Hagar and the Angel of 1668 in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, are further examples of Claude’s often-repeated essay on the theme of the morning and evening landscape. Again, the figures play a tiny and almost insignificant part in the picture, although in the Expulsion there is a feeling that they are reacting to the inhospitable nature of the cool morning. Such pictures, or pendants as they came to be known, were a great favourite with collectors because they were easier to hang in a room whose design was formal. A surprising number of painters of all schools in the seventeenth century painted pictures in this way, although an informality of hanging which developed in the nineteenth century has often obscured this.

The biblical story depicted in the paintings is the following.

Hagar, the Egyptian hand maiden of Sarah was the mother of Ishmael, Abraham’s first son. When Isaac, Sarah’s son, was born Ishmael mocked his younger brother so that Sarah asked Abraham to banish him, together with his mother. Abraham provided them with bread and a bottle of water and sent them off into the desert of Beersheba. When the water was spent Hagar put Ishmael under a bush to die and then sat some way off, weeping. But an angel appeared, by tradition the archangel Michael, and disclosed a well of water near by, so they were both saved. Two scenes, the banishment, and the appearance of the angel are common in 17th century Italian and Dutch painting.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 173). The pendant of the painting, Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert (LV 174), is also in the Alte Pinakothek.

This canvas, an early work by Claude, represents Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child going into Egypt to escape Herod’s persecution in Bethlehem. The peacefulness of the pastoral setting provides a sharp contrast to the violent massacre in the city they have fled.

The Judgment of Paris appeared on the art market in 1966. It was recognized as an autograph work, whose composition Claude had recorded in the drawing Liber Veritatis 94, and it can be considered a masterpiece of Claude’s mature period in the 1640s. The figures in this painting are among the largest and most painstakingly executed in the artist’s work. He worked out his ideas for their arrangement in a vigorous pen study. Claude borrowed certain details from Renaissance models, mining the engravings by Raimondi after Raphael and by Ghisi after Giovanni Battista Bertano.

This drawing records a painting, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in Liber Veritatis (no. 94). It depicts a landscape with the Judgment of Paris, in the foreground Paris, Juno, Minerva, Venus, and Cupid as well as animals.

This drawing is a preparatory study to a painting now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The Mill is one of Claude’s earliest paintings. In it he follows closely the example of Paul Bril, who developed in Rome the style of Late Mannerist landscape, with its artificial disposition of dark-brown foreground, lighter-green middle distance, and blue hills on the horizon, each stage being marked by wings as in a theatre, starting from a dark tree in the foreground. This artificiality of design was coupled with a stylized treatment of the detail, the trees in particular being painted in a set formula of frond-like branches.

In The Mill there on the left is the regulation dark tree; the foreground is filled with incidents of the kind which Bril loved - boats in construction, fragments of ancient columns, and small figures, in this case artists sketching a boy milking a goat; on the right is a picturesque tower; behind it the trees form the next stage, and the hills close in the background. The Mannerist scheme is carried out even to the formula for the tree silhouettes.

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 136).

The painting is included in Liber Veritatis (LV 80).

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 13 minutes):

Claudio Monteverdi: Il ritorno d’Ulisse, Act I, Duet of Odysseus and Pallas Athene

Claude rarely depicted ruins. In the View of Delphi he employed the motif of a procession, dear to Poussin. But the figures (for which he was perhaps assisted) became increasingly tiny and insignificant.

It is known from the Claude Lorrain’s early biographers of his constant excursions from Rome, wandering over the whole range of the country, sketching it with the pen, in wash, and even in oils. His surviving drawings confirm the extent and the subtlety of his observation. The variety of the drawings is endless. Some are prosaic notes of a building or a prospect, put down in a hard pen outline. Others are more carefully studied descriptions of a section of the landscape. In the View of Tivoli all these qualities are combined, and we have the poetical rendering of a startling visual impression - the hillside of Tivoli seen against the light. Before Claude no one had ventured to tackle such a subject, and since his time few have done so with success.

It is known from the Claude Lorrain’s early biographers of his constant excursions from Rome, wandering over the whole range of the country, sketching it with the pen, in wash, and even in oils. His surviving drawings confirm the extent and the subtlety of his observation. The variety of the drawings is endless. Some are prosaic notes of a building or a prospect, put down in a hard pen outline. Others are more carefully studied descriptions of a section of the landscape. Others, such as this drawing, are the immediate record of a suddenly perceived contre-jour effect.