Landscape with the Holy Family and Saint John the Baptist
Provenance
Private Collection, Normandy; sold at
Bonham’s, Paris, Collections of the Contents of Two French Castles, 20 March 2024, lot 13; acquired by
Private Collection, Paris
with Nicholas Hall Ltd., New York by 2025
from whom acquired by a Private Collection
This charming painting is among Claude Lorrain’s most naturalistic landscapes. Being painted on copper, it cannot be a true plein air painting, although the sense of topographical specificity and the naturalism of the late afternoon light convey a sense of a work that was painted outdoors. The artist and biographer Joachim Sandrart records that Claude did paint directly from nature, but there are no surviving paintings now considered actual plein air works. Among those that have been is a Sheep Fold in the Campagna in the Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (fig. 1), a painting dated 1656. It is to the 1650s that our painting, like that in Vienna not recorded in the Liber Veritatis, should be dated. The brilliant blue sky and the dense, naturalistic foliage are typical features of Claude’s small paintings from this decade. In particular, the confident, abbreviated depiction of the trees silhouetted on the slopes of the distant hill in our work is almost identical to that in the Vienna landscape. A comparison can also be made to the drawings from this decade. One example is the expansive view of the hills near Tivoli (Frick Collection, New York; fig. 2) and another is a group of pen and ink drawings from nature (Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, 1968, nos. 782-787), especially the small Louvre study (R 784), also dated to the 1650s.
Born in eastern France, Claude settled permanently in Rome in 1627 going on to become the leading landscape painter in Italy and indeed all Europe. From 1622–25 he worked in the studio of the landscape and marine artist Agostino Tassi in Rome and then travelled to Naples with the Flemish landscape painter Goffredo Wals. All three artists were much influenced by the work of Adam Elsheimer, a German painter in Rome in the first decade of the 17th century and a much greater talent than Tassi or Wals. Elsheimer painted landscape and figure subjects which showed the impact of northern landscape painting, the Venetian late 16th century, the Roman high renaissance and the early baroque of the Carracci. He worked on a small scale, very often on copper. He was a close friend of Rubens and became a leading pioneer of the new realism in Italian painting.
Among Elsheimer’s best known works was the Aurora, which shows the dawn light spreading out from behind a wooded hillside (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, GG 550; fig.3). Here the effulgent luminosity for which Claude became so famous is already on stage. Claude never saw the Aurora since it was taken back to Germany by Elsheimer’s associate Hendrick Goudt long before Claude came south but Goudt made a fine print after it which enhanced its fame. Claude’s stamping ground was the countryside around Rome and the present landscape resembles the Aurora in the level clouds in the sky though the light is more diffuse and a little later in the day. Similar clouds appear in an early morning Claude dated 1629 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (fig. 4).
On the basis of the similarities to Elsheimer discussed above, especially noticeable in the depiction of the sunlit clouds in this work, our copper was dated to 1629 by Ian Kennedy [see literature] and compared to the Washington painting by Claude of that year. In addition, there are a number of small works on copper known to have been painted by Claude early in his career. However, Francesco Gatta, upon firsthand inspection of the work, proposed the much later date of the 1650s, a view which Kennedy now endorses. The crystalline clarity of the sky and the clear similarities to the depiction of the distant landscape in the Akademie Sheep Fold all point to a date in the 1650s. The Sheep Fold remained in Claude’s collection until his death when he left it to his nephew. Our painting may also have remained in the artist’s collection, or have been given to a family member, which would explain why it is not recorded in the Liber Veritatis.
The figural group of the Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist, St Joseph and the donkey in our painting may be compared to those in two sheets, dateable ca. 1655, executed in pen and wash in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (Roethlisberger, nos. 746 and 747). The subject and the treatment of figural types, despite compositional variations, are extremely close (fig. 5).