CLAUDE LORRAIN (GELLÉE) (1600/05–1682)

CLAUDE LORRAIN (GELLÉE) (1600/05–1682), French painter, draftsman, and printmaker, active in Italy; recognized as one of the greatest landscape painters of the Western tradition. Claude Gellée—called le Lorrain, Claudio Lorenese, Claude Lorrain, or simply Claude—infused the early sixteenth-century Venetian pastoral with his direct studies from nature, resulting in depictions of an ideal world where man and nature are integrated into a perfected balance harmonized by subtle effects of light. His contribution was critical to the development of Western landscape. He was so successful during his lifetime that he became one of the most expensive and highly sought-after painters in Rome, with innumerable commissions from members of the papal court, the city's international community of diplomats and expatriate aristocrats, wealthy travelers to Italy, and royal courts across Europe.

After Claude's parents died in 1612, he may have been sent from what was then the independent duchy of Lorraine to Freiburg-im-Breisgau to live with an older brother, who was probably his first teacher. It is more certain that he traveled to Italy with an older relative, arriving in Rome as early as 1617. Claude studied with German landscape painter Goffredo Wals (c. 1590/95–1638/40) in Naples for two years sometime between 1618 and 1622, after which he returned to Rome and completed his training with Italian landscape painter and decorative artist Agostino Tassi (c. 1580–1644). Except for a brief return to Lorraine (1625–1627)—where he worked with the court painter Claude Déruet (c. 1588–1660) in the ducal palace at the capital of Nancy—and probable trips to other parts of Italy, he remained in Rome for the rest of his life. He became a member of the Accademia di San Luca in 1633, was offered (but declined) the post of "first rector" in 1654, and accepted the request to be in charge of all resident foreign members in 1669.

One of the key elements of Claude's success with landscape was undeniably linked to his brilliance as a draftsman, which is revealed in more than a thousand extant drawings. During the 1630s and early 1640s, he often intentionally left his studio in order to go into the countryside and draw directly after nature, one of the first landscape artists known to have done so. In the keenly observed studies he made during these outings, he recorded animals, individual elements of foliage, rock formations, and the effects of light and shade in rapidly sketched bucolic scenes (as in Pine Forest, late 1630s, Teylers Museum, Haarlem). They clearly provided the raw material for more fully developed compositions done later in his atelier.

An ever-increasing number of forgeries of Claude's work as early as the 1630s attest to his rapidly growing reputation. His response to this threat was to record the composition of each painting he made for the rest of his life in a highly finished drawing that he placed into what he referred to as his Liber veritatis (Book of truth), his own very personalized form of copyright. Inscriptions on the versos of these sheets often indicated the client for whom the work was made and, for the later works, the date. This group of drawings, often considered the pinnacle of Claude's draftsmanship, remained nearly intact and protected from light until the middle of the last century. Because of their rare state of preservation, combined with the artist's natural talent, these are regarded as among the most extraordinary European drawings of the seventeenth century that have been handed down to us. Claude's Pastoral Landscape of 1644 (L.V. 85, British Museum, London), a record of a painting made for an unknown Roman client (now in the Prado, Madrid), reveals aspects of the essence of Claude's classicism: open, fluid designs with low horizon lines and architectural groupings or a variety of vegetation to mark one's visual progress through the expanse of the juxtaposed diagonal planes of land or small winding rivers that gently recede into the distance.

Claude explored the potential of printmaking in two distinct periods of his career: 1626–1641 and 1651–1663. Not surprisingly, he chose the painter's medium of etching, for, unlike the arduous manner of engraving that was often left to specialists, etching enabled him to draw on the copper-plate in a manner akin to using a pen on paper. More than forty prints, such as his Goatherd, 1663 (Mannocci 44, second state, British Museum, London), where every stroke of the etching needle contributed to the atmospheric whole, provide eloquent testimony to Claude's high level of success. These replicable records of his work also ensured that his new ideal and classicizing visual language spread swiftly to artists, amateurs, and collectors across Europe throughout his career.

Fortunately, more than 250 of Claude's paintings have survived. One of his most elegant and important late canvases, painted in 1675 for Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, his principal patron during his later years, is View of Carthage with Dido and Aeneas (Hamburger Kunsthalle), which demonstrates Claude's pivotal role in the history of seascapes and coastal scenes. It is also an excellent illustration of how his marvelous use of light both unifies a composition and imbues it with emotion. This painting also reveals how Claude increasingly varied his most common theme of shepherds tending their flocks with scenes from mythology, history, and religion in order to elevate the significance of the genre of landscape and to broaden the appeal of his work.

Claude's distinguished contribution to humanity's ongoing visual interpretation of its place in the natural world made him the most influential landscape painter in Western art. It is impossible to imagine the work of such later landscapists as Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), John Constable (1776–1837), J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875), or Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) without the precedent of his paintings, drawings, and prints, which conveyed the ideal beauty and grandeur of nature suffused with the infinite mysteries of light. It remains a legacy that artists continue to confront today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Askew, Pamela, ed. Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682: A Symposium. Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts Symposium Series III, National Gallery of Art Studies in the History of Art, vol. 14. Washington, D.C., 1982.

Bjurström, Per. Claude Lorrain: Sketchbook Owned by the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Stockholm, 1984.

Haus der Kunst. Im Licht von Claude Lorrain. Exhibition catalogue by Marcel Roethlisberger. Munich, 1983.

Kitson, Michael. Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis. London, 1978.

Lagerlöf, Margaretha Rossholm. Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. Translated by Nancy Adler. New Haven and London, 1990.

Mannocci, Lino. The Etchings of Claude Lorrain. New Haven and London, 1988.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy. Turner et le Lorrain. Exhibition catalogue by Ian Warrell. Nancy and Paris, 2002.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, and French Academy in Rome. Claude Gellée et les peintres lorrains en Italie au XVIIe siècle. Exhibition catalogue. Jacques Thuillier and Pierre Arizzoli-Clémentel, eds. Nancy and Rome, 1982.

National Gallery. Claude: The Poetic Landscape. Exhibition catalogue by Humphrey Wine. London, 1994.

National Gallery of Art and Galeries nationale du Grand Palais. Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682. Exhibition catalogue by H. Diane Russell. Washington, D.C., and Paris, 1982.

Roethlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain: The Drawings. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968.

——. Claude Lorrain: The Paintings. 2 vols. New Haven and London, 1961; reprinted New York, 1981.