Often referred to simply as Claude, Claude Gellée, the French artist from Lorrain who spent most of his career in Rome was the painter par excellence of idealised landscapes.
Arriving in Rome sometime before 1620, Claude is said to have first worked as a pastry chef and studied with the obscure German landscape painter Goffredo Wals in Naples, before entering the household of painter Agostino Tassi, where he advanced from servant to studio assistant. Very little is known of his early trajectory, but his earliest surviving dated painting, a Pastoral Landscape, is dated 1629 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia); the influence of Wals and Tassi, as well as northern landscape painters active in Rome such as Paul Bril and Adam Elsheimer, are evident in this work. Claude’s early compositions, small and typically executed on copper, follow a certain composition derived from these mentors, depicting receding tracts of land in which a dark foreground is succeeded by a bright green middle ground and terminating in a cool blue distance. Claude was especially skilled in his use of light and thus in evoking different times of day and weather conditions, the result of constant study of the atmosphere of the countryside around Rome where he sketched freely and relentlessly en plein air. By contrast, he was a perfectionist when he returned to the studio, at pains to perfect perspective, balance his compositions, and render each element with great attention to detail.
Claude’s reputation grew steadily throughout the 1630s; in 1633, the artist joined the Accademia di San Luca, and he soon enjoyed an international reputation. In Italy he worked for Cardinals Crescenzi, Bentivoglio, Carlo de’ Medici, and Angelo Giori, as well as Pope Urban VIII and Giulio Rospigliosi before he assumed the papacy. Claude also enjoyed royal patronage; King Philip IV of Spain commissioned a series of landscapes to decorate the new Buen Retiro Palace (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). A spate of French ambassadors in Rome, including Philippe de Béthune and the Marquis de Coeuvres, ordered pictures, as did the Bishop of Le Mans. Although based in Rome, Claude’s fame increased abroad as many of his paintings were sent back to Paris. He was widely imitated and even forged. In 1635, Claude began the Liber Veritatis (British Museum, London), an album of drawings recording nearly every painting he made as well as their dates of creation and destination. Able to charge high prices for his paintings, Claude worked at a relatively slow pace, enough to ensure his material comfort rather than accumulate genuine wealth.
Study of Bolognese landscape painting, especially that of Domenichino, engendered new developments in his works of the 1640s, and he perfected the style now deemed the ‘ideal landscape.’ He continued to paint the same mythological, pastoral, and biblical subjects (though never with the historical veracity adhered to by his friend Nicolas Poussin), but began to frame his compositions with monumental architectural structures to create ever more impressive vistas, as in Ulysses Returning Chryseis to Her Father of 1644 (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Pastel banners flutter in a light breeze along the quay and his typically indifferent staffage carries out their tasks, while sunlight drenches the harbor, backlighting the magnificent ship and glinting off the rippling water. His evocation of the humid, hazy atmosphere of the port creates a poetic mood and, given the subject matter, a nostalgia for the classical past. At the same time, his pictures increased in size, now destined for grand palazzi.
The 1650s was Claude’s most heroic phase, during which his landscapes were transformed into vast panoramas with seemingly endless horizons. In The Pastoral Capriccio with the Arch of Constantine of 1651 (Duke of Westminster, London), Claude achieved an unprecedented monumentality with grand architectural and natural elements rendered with perfected harmony and balance. Although the work lacks any explicit subject, it nonetheless encourages the viewer to meander through a golden age of natural perfection.
During the last two decades of his long career, Claude worked progressively on a larger scale, painted fewer pictures each year, and worked for more exclusive patrons. His affective powers and the range of poetic moods he could conjure became increasingly profound, as in The Origin of Coral of 1674 (Holkham Hall, Norfolk). Naturalism was superseded by the dreamlike, ethereal quality of his last landscapes.
Selected artworks
Top 3 auction prices
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Details
Further Reading
Diane Russell, Claude Lorrain: 1600–1682, exh. cat., New York, 1982.
Humphrey Wine, Claude: The Poetic Landscape, exh. cat., London, 1994.
Marcel Rothlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, 2 vols., New York, 1979.
Alan Wintermute, Claude to Corot: The Development of Landscape Painting in France, New York, 1990.
Notable Exhibitions
Paris, Musée du Louvre, Claude Gellée, dit Le Lorrain: un dessinateur face à la nature, 21 April – 18 July 2011; travelled to Haarlem, Teylers Museum, 29 November 2011 – 8 January 2012. Curated by Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken and Michiel Plomp.
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape, 6 October 2011 – 8 January 2012; travelled to Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum, 3 February – 6 May 2012. Curated by Jon Whiteley.
London, National Gallery of Art, Claude: the poetic landscape, 26 January – 10 April 1994. Curated by Humphrey Wine.
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Claude Gellée dit Le Lorrain, 1600–1682, 17 October 1982 – 2 January 1983; travelled to Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1983. Curated by H. Diane Russell and Pierre Rosenberg.