Claude Lorrain

Italian painter

• Born: 1600
• Birthplace: Chamagne, Lorraine, France
• Died: November 23, 1682
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Claude Lorrain established landscape in Roman and French painting as a subtle and varied means of artistic expression on an equal level with the older genres of religious and historical painting. He is one of the greatest masters of all time in the painting of the ideal landscape.

Early Life

Claude Lorrain (klohd law-rahn), known to the French as le Lorrain, was born the third of five sons. In 1612, his parents died and he went to Freiburg im Breisgau to live with an elder brother, Jean, a wood-carver. In 1613, he accompanied a relative to Rome and remained there to become a pastry cook. In this capacity, he obtained employment in the house of Agostino Tassi, the landscape painter. Gradually he learned the rudiments of painting from Tassi, who became his principal master at this time. Claude may have been one of the apprentices employed by the Cavalier d’Arpino and Tassi on the decoration of the Villa Lante, Bagnaia, which was completed by 1616.

At some time between 1616 and 1622, Claude went to Naples to work under the Flemish artist known in Italy as Goffredo Wals. This visit had a lasting effect on Claude. He was haunted by the beauty of the Gulf of Naples and reproduced to the end of his life the coast from Pozzuoli to Sorrento. In April, 1625, Claude departed from Rome for Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. There he worked as assistant to the Lorrainese court painter Claude Deruet painting architectural backgrounds to his vault frescoes for the Carmelite church. By the beginning of 1627, Claude returned to Rome. He remained in Rome until his death, with only one recorded absence, in 1660.

In 1627, Claude painted for both Italians and foreigners and was commissioned by Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio to make two landscapes, but no certain works by him survive from before 1630. During the early 1630’s, he was active chiefly as a fresco decorator in the Palazzi Crescenzi and Muti. Although the fine quality of the Muti frescoes was a major factor in establishing his artistic reputation, he never again worked in the fresco medium.

Life’s Work

Still comparatively unknown in 1633, by 1638 Claude was the leading landscape painter in Italy, with commissions to his credit from the pope, several cardinals, the king of Spain, and the French ambassador. From that time, patrons were never lacking, and his paintings, which fetched high prices, were in demand by both Italian and foreign collectors. At this time, Claude’s style began to attract the attention of imitators and forgers. In 1634, the artist Sébastien Bourdon thought it profitable to copy Claude’s style and pass off one of his own paintings as a work of Claude. As a measure of his artistic reputation, in 1635 Claude began to record his compositions in the Liber veritatis (book of truth). Though incomplete at first, the Liber veritatis , from 1640 onward, formed a virtually complete inventory of Claude’s production.

In addition to the influence of his early master Tassi, the roots of Claude’s landscape style can be traced to the Dutchman Paul Brill and the German Adam Elsheimer. In Rome, Brill and Tassi had developed the late mannerist landscape tradition. This style, with its artificial nature, consists of the division of the picture into areas of dark greenish-brown foreground, light green middle distance, and blue hills on the far distant horizon. Each area of the composition is set out in coulisses, side pieces at either side of a stage arranged to give room for exits and entrances, starting from a dark tree in the foreground to create a sense of infinite distance. This artificiality of design is combined with stylized treatment of the trees, painted in a set formula of feathery fronds in silhouette. In paintings of the early 1630’s, such as The Mill (1631), Claude followed Brill closely. The influence of Elsheimer is more evident in Claude’s etchings of this period.

As a result of these influences, Claude developed a style that is neither as heroic nor as classical as that of his great contemporary Nicolas Poussin , but rather is capable of expressing both a more poetic mood and a livelier sense of the beauty and variety of nature. The most significant element of this style is his varied treatment of atmosphere and light: the calm glow of evening, the brilliance of noon, the cool light of early morning. Claude studied these carefully on his frequent sketching excursions into the Roman countryside using pen, wash, and even oils. He represented these lights with a subtlety unparalleled in his time and not excelled before Impressionism. Whereas Elsheimer explored the strong dramatic effects of moonlight or dark twilight, Claude aimed at serenity, minimizing value contrasts to preserve the calm unity of the whole.

The light of Claude’s paintings usually emanates from an area of the sky immediately above the horizon, so that the viewer may gaze directly or almost directly into it. It spreads forward and outward through the composition, permeating the whole landscape with its radiance and joining background and foreground in one continuous spatial unity. By the late 1630’s, Claude had carried these effects almost to the point of exaggeration. Shadowy masses of trees in the foreground are contrasted with a misty sunlit vista. In several of the seaport scenes, a corridor of light emanates from the sun, just visible above the horizon. The Harbor Scene (1634) is one of the earliest examples of this phenomenon in the history of painting.

Claude was intrigued by the pastoral life described in the poems of Vergil as well as by the mythic age when Aeneas founded Rome. Some works even depict themes from this early phase of the Aeneid . His knowledge of Vergil came through translations and conversations with learned friends, since he was not a Latin scholar. The pastoral illustrations from the Vatican Virgil , which was studied by his friends, along with actual Roman frescoes of country landscapes and architectural scenes, also influenced his development. Claude’s painting at times included ruins, and it was an essential part of his intention to create a feeling of nostalgia for the past.

Claude did not develop a composition logically from the particular theme of a painting. His concern, which went beyond the theme of any given work, was the beauty of the Roman landscape, which, in its pictorial possibilities, had gone unnoticed. The scenes he painted were given significance by his understanding of the particular light that bathes them. In short, the content of Claude’s paintings is actually a poetic rendition of the subtle, changing light and atmosphere of the countryside.

Between 1640 and 1660, Claude refined his complete mastery over every type of landscape painting. His style became calmer and the lighting more diffused as in The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca (1648). An idyllic pastoral mood permeates many of these mature landscapes. He turned to both sacred and classical literature for subject matter and included a conventional type of Arcadian shepherd for the pastoral scenes. He selected and combined all the familiar pictorial elements—tall trees against the sky, villages, distant hills, winding streams, fragments of classical architecture, large bodies of water—in such a way as to convey a sense of repose and enchantment.

In Claude’s late phase, 1660-1682, the earlier process of idealization, of setting the imaginary world of the painting at a distance from the real world, was taken much further. The human figure, never very important, was reduced to insignificance, totally dominated by the scenery. His last paintings, such as Ascanius and the Stag (1682), represent a dreamland in which the forms are so shadowy that they hardly interrupt the continuity of the air in which light has a mysterious magical property.

Claude was a respected member of the colony of foreign artists in Rome. He remained on good terms with Poussin until his death in 1665. Claude never married but had a daughter, Agnese, born in 1653, who lived with him until his death. Though he amassed a small fortune, he lived frugally and quietly and had no ambitions beyond the pursuit of his art. He was seriously ill in 1663, suffered from gout in his later years, and died on November 23, 1682. He was buried in the French Church of Trinità dei Monti, above Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Biographies of him were first published by his friend Joachim von Sandrart in 1675 and by Filippo Baldinucci in 1728.

Significance

Claude Lorrain brought to its limit the study of light and atmosphere as a means of creating imaginative, pictorial unity. The experience of drawing had major significance for his paintings. He made many finished preparatory sketches and etchings for paintings that often reveal the evolution of his design. Claude’s drawings illustrate the wide range and intensity of his observations. There is an endless variety to his sketches made from nature, and they are often bolder than his paintings. Most of the nature drawings, which include rapid pen sketches, black chalk, washes, and oils, were done before 1645. The majority of these embody some unexpected effect of light: changing light in a valley, a path through a sunlit wood, a tree seen contre-jour—pointed toward or nearly toward the chief source of light. To render precisely, for example, the complexity of light effects with reflections in a valley, he, at times, permitted the solidity of the hills to disappear. No artist before Claude had attempted such a subject. Claude was able to capture the infinity of nature within the narrowly defined boundaries of classical composition, that is, art derived from the study of antique exemplars. His methods showed that French classicism, best exemplified in the disciplined, rational approach of Poussin, could be softened to reveal the poetic side of nature.

Poussin constructs hollow, boxlike space filled with solid objects that recede in clearly defined steps. Claude creates looser space almost always leading the eye to infinity on the horizon. Atmosphere fills and unifies this space. Recession occurs by the subtle gradation of color, usually in trees that have no sharp outline. Poussin rarely represents water, but when he does it is the static surface of a river that clearly reflects the surrounding scene. Claude chooses to render the constant motion of the sea. The eye is led over the continuous surface of the sea to the horizon by no means other than color, tone changes, and minute variations in the surface of wave patterns that reflect light. Poussin’s buildings are simple solid blocks; Claude’s porticoes, facades, and towers are seen against the Sun and lose their substance in the atmosphere. Poussin’s trees are marble, Claude’s reflect light.

Claude is rightly regarded as one of the greatest landscape painters in history. It is his stress on the subjective side of nature, the attempt to capture a mood, that made his work so popular with the early Romantics, most notably Joseph Mallord William Turner. From his own time to the present, Claude has enjoyed a great reputation, especially in England, and his popularity has remained undimmed.

Bibliography

Lagerlöf, Margaretha Rossholm. Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorraine. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. A study of landscape paintings created by three sixteenth and seventeenth century artists.

Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965. Examines how the literary and poetic appeal of the Italian landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa shaped English taste and concepts of landscape beauty.

Röthlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain: The Drawings. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Catalog of the artist’s almost twelve hundred known drawings, with information on drawing types, styles, and techniques. Volume 1 contains precise information to correspond with each black-and-white plate in volume 2.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Claude Lorrain: The Paintings. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961. Catalog of Claude’s existing output as a painter, nearly 250 oils. The introduction to volume 1 includes a basic summary of artistic influences and stylistic development. Each black-and-white plate in volume 2 has a corresponding text in volume 1.

Russell, H. Diane. Claude Lorrain, 1600-1682. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982. This comprehensive volume is excellent in every respect. Illustrations of paintings and drawings are in color, two-tone, and black-and-white. Contains historical commentaries, an intricate chronology, a glossary, a fine bibliography, and appendices.

Schade, Weiner, ed. Claude Lorrain: Paintings and Drawings. Munich, Germany: Schirmer Art Books, 1998. Critical study of Claude Lorrain’s artwork, illustrated with reproductions of his paintings and drawings.

Whiteley, J. J. L. Claude Lorraine: Drawings from the Collections of the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum. London: British Museum Press, 1998. Catalog of an exhibition held at the British Museum from October 9, 1998, through January 10, 1999.

Wine, Humphrey. Claude: The Poetic Landscape. London: National Gallery Publications, 1994. Catalog of an exhibition held at the National Gallery in London from January 26 through April 10, 1994.