Claude Lorrain
Master of the ideal landscape.
Claude Lorrain painted sunsets over ancient harbours and Arcadian landscapes. English garden designers later tried to build his pictures in reality.
Claude Lorrain's real name was Claude Gellée, and he was born around 1600 in Chamagne in the Duchy of Lorraine, hence his name. He was orphaned early and came to Italy as a young man. According to an early biography he first worked as a pastry cook, but this is uncertain. In Rome he became an assistant to the landscape painter Agostino Tassi, and he also spent some time in Naples.
After a short return visit to Lorraine he settled in Rome for good in 1627. During the 1630s he became famous, and he received commissions from popes, cardinals and the King of Spain. He was so sought after that forgeries began to appear. To protect himself he made drawings of almost all his paintings and collected them in a book, the Liber Veritatis, the book of truth. It is now in the British Museum in London.
Claude's pictures are ideal landscapes. They show harbours with ancient palaces, or verdant valleys with ruins, shepherds and small figures from myth or the Bible. The real subject is the light. The sun often stands low on the horizon and the depth of the picture is filled with a golden haze. A well-known example is Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba of 1648 in the National Gallery in London. He drew a great deal outdoors in the countryside around Rome, which was unusual at the time.
Claude never married but had a daughter, who lived with him. He led a quiet life and died in Rome in 1682.
His influence was greatest in England. English travellers bought his pictures and tried to create similar landscapes in their parks, as at Stourhead. Tourists used a tinted mirror, a so-called Claude glass, to see nature as in his paintings. J. M. W. Turner admired him so much that he stipulated in his will that two of his own pictures should hang beside two of Claude's in the National Gallery.