Claude Lorrain

Published 21 Sep 2020

A Frenchman in Rome

                     Claude Lorrain: Seaport at Sunset 1639

From humble origins as a pastry cook and then assistant to a decorative painter, Claude Gellée of Lorraine rose to become one of the most exclusive landscape painters of his time. Known as Claude Lorrain, he spent his adult life in Rome, working for the noblest patrons. He studied constantly the effects of light and atmosphere in the surrounding countryside, and his depictions of sunlight created his most spectacular images.

Seaport at Sunset detail

Out of his intense contemplations of nature Claude created a blissful vision which elevated this style of painting to the classical grandeur of contemporary history painting. And these ‘ideal’ landscapes were to become the inspiration of other landscape artists throughout Europe for generations to come.

                          Claude Lorrain: The Roman Forum 1639

Most of Claude’s landscape paintings are imaginary, but this one sticks to reality, showing all its features in the right places. 

1. Arch of Septimus Severus
2. Arch of Titus
3. Temple of Castor and Pollux
4. Temple of Saturn      

                   George Inness: Roman Campagna (detail) 1858

As a young man, Claude left his native Lorraine for Rome, whose surrounding countryside – the Campagna – was to provide him with a source of inspiration for the rest of his life.

                             The Lorraine Region of France

The name Lorrain was used in French to indicate his place of birth, while in English it has been usual since the 18th century simply to call the artist Claude. He seems to have begun work as a pastry cook, and maybe it was in that trade that he travelled to Italy sometime during his teens. He was settled in Rome by 1613, where he was apprenticed to the artist Agustino Tassi. Tassi was a prolific painter of marine and landscape subjects, whose pictures were profoundly indebted to the work of northern landscape painters active in Rome.

                 Agostino Tassi: Festivities on the Coast: 1620

Tassi also designed illusionistic ceiling decorations for a number of Roman palaces, and Claude may well have helped with the decorations he executed in Cardinal Montalto’s Villa Lante at Pagnaia. At some time during these early years, Claude probably also worked for a time in Naples, with the Flemish landscape painter Gottfried Wals.

Gottfried Wals: Classical Ruins with Figures

Claude returned briefly to Lorraine in 1625 to work with the local master Claude Deruet on fresco decorations in the Carmelite church at Nancy. Deruet, in common with other artists from Lorraine, had himself spent some time studying in Italy before returning to his native land. But Claude returned to settle in Rome for the rest of his life. 

Piazza Navona, Rome

The piazza was in the area below the church of SS Trinità dei Monti and was a haven for northern artists staying in Rome.

                                 Palazzo  dei Crescenzi, Rome

He is recorded as executing fresco decorations in the Palazzo  dei Crescenzi in Rome around 1630, but he devoted the rest of his career to easel pictures. By the mid-1680s he was established as the leading landscape painter in Rome, working for Roman patrons and for visitors from all over Catholic Europe.

Claude Lorrain: Landscape with Merchants, c1629

Claude lived for nearly all of his life in one or other of two adjacent streets below the hilltop church of SS Trinità del Monti. He never married, but an illegitimate daughter, Agnes, was born in 1653, and two nephews came to live with him in the 1660s. 

Landscape with Merchants detail

Apart from employing an assistant in the middle decades of his career, Claude did not have a large team of helpers and students, which would have been the normal studio practice for a successful artist at the time. But in fact we know little about his life or personality. Unlike his friend Nicholas Poussin, it seems Claude was not a scholarly artist, learned in history, philosophy and classical archaeology.

Claude Lorrain: Coast View with the Abduction of Europa

But he was of a contemplative cast of mind, and had an intuitive understanding of his subject matter. When illustrating a Biblical of classical literary text, he was sensitive to its meaning, and could produce an appropriate landscape setting of great beauty and subtlety in its visual interpretation.

Claude Lorrain: Coast View with the Abduction of Europa (detail)

It is a sign of Claude’s growing reputation that in about 1635 he received an important commission on behalf of Philip IV of Spain. The King was completing his Buen Retiro palace at Madrid, and a number of young northern artists in Rome were asked to provide large landscape paintings as part of the decorations.

Buen Retiro Pallace, Madrid

Claude contributed at least seven very large canvases. They all had religious themes, and Claude now began to adapt the character and mood of his landscapes to suit the subject in hand. The large scale encouraged a grand, bold and monumental style, whereas his earlier works had been small and detailed in the northern tradition.

Claude Lorrain: View of Tivoli

Claude’s biographer, Sandrart, tells us of their sketching trips together around 1630, when they went out into the countryside surrounding Rome, the Campagna, in the company of other northern artists. They also sometimes went further afield into the hills to wilder and more picturesque places such as Tivoli.

Claude Lorrain: Landscape with an Imaginary View of Tivoli 1642

His idealised landscapes create images of nature more ordered and beautiful than nature itself. In the tradition of the Arcadian landscape, Claude shows mankind living in harmony with nature and in close proximity to the classical past.

Claude Lorrain: Landscape with the Flight into Egypt c1646

It is the majestic trees and the misty sunlight in the horizon that create a sense of space in this overwhelming river landscape, which is broken up by temple ruins, castle towers and aqueducts.

The Holy Family, Joseph and Mary, followed by the archangel Gabriel are on their way to Egypt to escape King Herod’s soldiers. The group is only a small detail in this magnificent landscape, inspired by the Campagna around Rome that Lorrain was so fond of.

The shepherds with their musical instruments in the foreground recall memories of a distant Arcadia (the word means 'utopia'). Nevertheless, the dead tree in this otherwise paradisal landscape serves as a reminder of ultimate mortality. 

Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli

Tivoli, with its famous ruined Roman Temple known as the Temple of the Sybil (Sybil means prophetess), its rugged hillsides, caverns and gushing waterfalls, had been a popular site for landscape painters and draftsmen since the 16th century. 

Fountains at Tivoli

Claude made many drawings there, and the Roman temple and parts of the landscape feature in his paintings. The rugged and wild nature of the place attracted Claude, but his instinct was to render it more serene and idealised, and he preferred the panoramic views from Tivoli across the Campania to Rome and the sea, rather than the place itself.

Claude Lorrain: Pastoral Landscape 1677

Although he filled his sketchbooks with beautiful drawings, Claude’s oil paintings only very rarely depicted real places. While intense observation of nature remained the basis of his art, Claude increasingly preferred to employ his imagination to show nature in an elevated or ideal state. His mature landscapes are grand and calm, and invite the spectator to contemplate an eternal, or at least timeless, state of nature, rather than to dwell on its transient effects. 

Claude Lorrain: Capriccio with ruins of the Roman Forum

A capriccio is a painting or work of art representing a fantasy or a mixture of real and imaginary features. Compare this painting with the one of the Roman Forum above.

Claude Lorrain: Landscape with the Landing of Aeneas at Pallenteum 1675

Claude and his patrons seem to have been particularly attracted by the heroic deeds of Aeneas and his companions during the later part of his career. In response to his literary source, Claude developed a more epic or heroic style in his landscapes and worked rather less often in the gentle pastoral mode.

Claude Lorrain: The Shooting of the Stag of Silvia 1682

Based on a story from Virgil's epic poem, the Aeneid. Apparently, it was a pet stag, the shooting of which provoked a war. The painting was Claude’s last one, for he died in the year it was completed.

Church of Trinità die Monti, Rome

He was buried in the church of Trinità die Monti in Rome, overlooking the artist’s quarter where he had spent most of his life.

Pastoral Poetry

Gaspare Vanvitelli: Waterfall at Tivoli, late 17^th century

Claude was a keen student of nature, especially in the early decades of his career, making regular trips out into the Campagna around Rome with fellow artists from the North. During this time in Italy, landscape painting tended to be the speciality of these foreign artists – from north of the Alps – as Italian painters clung to Renaissance ideas and considered landscapes simply decorative and lacking in intellectual content or depth.

Photo of Tivoli

Compare that painting with the photograph of the waterfall at Tivoli. There is no point of resemblance at all.

Claude Lorrain: Italian Landscape 1648

Free of Italian attitudes to landscape painting, northern painters found a ready market for their paintings which allowed art lovers to enjoy their skills of observation and their representation of everyday life, as well as their portrayal of space and light.

Claude's Landscape Layout

1. The Plants

The conventions of Claude’s landscape design are simple to describe. Generally, the shadowed foreground is characterised by some precisely painted plants, seen clearly in the painting above. 

2. The Main Figures

The main figures are on the next plane, while left or right tall trees frame the scene, perhaps with a view of ancient architecture.

3. The Middle Distance

The eye is led through to the middle distance by a winding stretch of water, which may be spanned by a bridge with little figures in the act of crossing. In the middle distance is a balancing group of trees.

4. The Panorama

To one side, there may be a hill town or a wooded hill. The landscape then opens out into a misty panorama, culminating in distant hills. Each feature will be carefully plotted in space so that, as the painter Richard Wilson said in the 18^th century, it is quite possible for the spectator to take a walk through the landscape.

Annibale Carracci: The Flight into Egypt

This way of creating the ideal landscape had been established earlier in the 17^th century by the Italian history painter Annibale Carracci. Less interested in the passing effects of nature, Carracci used landscape settings to express the meaning and the emotion of the stories taking place in them. 

Claude Lorrain: Pastoral Caprice with the Arch of Constantine 1651

In his works Claude was influenced by the rational and emphatic approach of Carracci, but added to it a keener feeling for the details of nature and the play of light, both of which he had inherited from northern artistic traditions.

Claude Lorrain: Morning in the Harbour 1638

This northern influence is very evident in Claude’s landscapes and seaports, which are remarkable for their sensitive observation. It is particularly notable in his treatment of light, both for the way it gives unity to a scene and for the way he uses it to pick out interesting details of nature or of human activity on the seashore or in the countryside.

        Adam Elsheimer: Landscape with the Birth of the Adonis

Claude may also have drawn inspiration from the work of the German landscape painter Adam Elshiermer, who developed a very personal poetic and atmospheric approach.

Agostino Tassi: The Embarkation of a Queen

From Agostino Tassi Claude developed a strong interest in linear perspective, which can create a sense of space in depth.

Claude Lorrain: Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba 1678

He applied this especially in his seaports, for which he was most famous early in his career. These reach their dramatic artistic culmination in his Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.

One of Claude’s literary sources was the Latin poet Ovid, especially his Metamorphosis, tales of the loves and the magical transformations of the minor gods and goddesses.

Claude Lorrain: Landscape with Narcissus and Echo 1644

Claude always matched the style and mood of his landscapes to their subject matter. Thus, the Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, one of Claude’s most poetic and delicate landscapes, is the perfect setting for the story of Narcissus, 

Narcissus

who is seen in the foreground, absorbed by his own reflection and failing to notice 

Two Nymphs

Echo and another nymph (a spirit of nature envisaged as a beautiful maiden) calling from the bushy hillside.

                                         

The nude figure is the spirit of this place, a nymph who is guardian of the spring. 

Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Castle                   

One of Claude's most celebrated and moving evocations of poetic mood is his Landscape with Psyche at the Palace of Cupid, otherwise known as The Enchanted Castle. This unusual subject is taken from the Metamorphosis and shows a mournful Psyche on the seashore outside the palace of Cupid.

Supplements 

Claude Lorrain: Egeria Weeps over Numa

Claude Lorrain: Coast View

Claude Lorrain: The Dance of the Seasons

Above: Large Italian Landscape circa 1890 painted by a heavily influenced follower of Claude Lorraine. Superb depth and detail.

 

1600-1682

 

Links to more posts on painting:

Rembrandt

Renoir

Edward Hopper

Raphael

Vermeer

Leonardo da Vinci

Boticceli

Michelangelo

Van Gogh

Pissarro

Liberty Leading the People

Claude Lorrain