Ink and Light: The Influence of Claude Lorrain's Etchings on England 9780773589315

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ink and light

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John Jackson and William Ward after Claude Lorrain, Self-Portrait, 1825 (engraving on paper, 8.3 cm
6.4 cm)

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andrew brink

ink and light the influence of claude lorrain’s etchings on england

Published for the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre by McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 isbn 978-0-7735-4198-6 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-8931-5 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-8932-2 (epub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Brink, Andrew W., 1932–2011, author Ink and light : the influence of Claude Lorrain’s etchings on England / Andrew Brink. Published in conjunction with an exhibition; features forty of Claude Lorrain’s etchings from the Brink Collection, which are housed at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4198-6 (bound) isbn 978-0-7735-8931-5 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-8932-2 (epub) 1. Lorrain, Claude, 1600–1682 – Influence. 2. Etching – France – 17th century. 3. Etching – England. 4. Brink Collection. I. Lorrain, Claude, 1600–1682. Etchings. Selections. II. Brink Collection III. Title. ne2049.5.l67b75 2013

769.92

c2013-903658-x

c2013-903659-8

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 11/15

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I should like to dedicate this study, and the exhibition it accompanies, to the memory of Professor V.C. “Bert” Brink at the University of British Columbia. Bert was a biologist, naturalist, and environmentalist who would have perfectly understood my wish to bring the art of Claude Lorrain to a Canadian audience.

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contents

Acknowledgments ix Preface xi 1 Claude Lorrain’s Etchings in England 3 2 Claudian Architecture 65 3 Original and Reproductive Prints 71 4 Themes in the Etchings 85 Biographical Essentials 121 List of Works 125 Collecting Claude 137 Notes 143 Selected Bibliography 151 Index 157

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chapter three

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to Helen Brink for her encouragement and support throughout the preparation of this book. For their helpful readings of the text, my thanks also go to Professor Alvin A. Lee and Professor Paul H. Walton of McMaster University. Judith Nasby, director and curator, and Dawn Owen, curator of Contemporary Art, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre at the University of Guelph, have generously facilitated this project. Preliminary work was enjoyably done in the print collections of the British Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum; and New York Public Library, to mention only the most important. Among dealers, Henk Van Walleghem of Izegem, Belgium, has been especially helpful.

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preface

fiat lux, or let there be light

The purpose of this study is to show Claude Lorrain’s etchings as a coherent group epitomizing his entire artistic production. The thematic concerns of his drawings and paintings are concentrated and summarized in the etchings. While not every subject is touched upon, especially those in later paintings arising from Ovid and Virgil, the underlying concerns are fully present in the etchings, which is to say that they contain the essence of Claude’s discovery of how light gives nature its life. Next, the book documents Claude’s unrivaled cultural importance in eighteenthcentury England. Although it was slow to be accepted, Claude’s view of nature as benign and welcoming took hold of the imaginations of English artists and patrons such that it came to dominate landscape art, including architecture and gardening. English literary culture had prepared for the advent of Claude’s art, which replaced the topographical with an enchanting idealism. The apotheosis of Claude’s vision of nature was brief. The etchings typify only an encapsulated moment in human interaction with the natural landscape. His art induced a contemplative attitude towards the English landscape just as it was undergoing ever more drastic changes in the Industrial Revolution. The eighteenth-century achievement of balance, of equipoise between man and nature, was occasionally fitful and of short duration. Even so, improvements prompted by Claudian idealism left a legacy of good paintings, drawings, and prints; classical buildings; and charmingly designed landscape gardens. The nineteenth century lived in the afterglow of the picturesque, while the twentieth century saw it expire.

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Taking a long view of what happened, it might be said that Renaissance precepts of how to look upon nature terminated in the muddled, refractory anti-art of our own time. Leon Battista Alberti’s (1404–1472) revolutionary proposal was that the artist’s principal task was to produce a convincing imitation of nature, a likeness of its order. The artist should systematically represent nature in such a way as to produce a harmony of parts resulting in beauty. Beauty is inherent in nature and by close observation and representation it can be revealed. This was Claude’s task, as it was of most landscape artists who unquestioningly followed Alberti’s teachings. Needless to say, Alberti’s views no longer govern the multitude of practices labeled art. Yet Claude’s reputation has never stood higher, persisting amidst confusion over what constitutes landscape art in an era when beauty is radically devalued. At the moment, there is a revival of interest in his drawings that gives the liveliest evidence of his responses to nature. While his large paintings have always enjoyed gallery-goers’ respectful awe, interest has shifted to the range of drawings, from spontaneous to finished, that disclose Claude’s sensibility at work. The etchings are a perfect complement to the drawings, while sometimes also suggesting the finish of paintings: an art mid-way between drawing and painting. Their comparative neglect is understandable, but there is much more meaning to be found in the etchings than has been acknowledged. It is time to explore further the “essential Claude” concentrated in the etchings and to ask how and why they so empowered eighteenth-century English culture.

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ink and light

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Claude Lorrain’s Etchings in England

Claude Gellée le Lorrain (circa 1604/5–1682) is the celebrated seventeenth-century founder of landscape painting, best known for his Italian pastorals and harbour scenes. Together with Nicolas Poussin and Salvator Rosa, Claude painted nature and antiquity in the glow of Italian dawns and dusks. Classical and Christian themes are set in landscapes suffused with preternatural light. Dramas of human interaction occur in natural and architectural settings devised to draw viewers into wonder and enchantment. Whereas Poussin’s classicism is severely intellectual and Rosa’s wild and romantic, Claude’s resonates with gentler associations from Virgil and Ovid, set in closely observed nature. His paintings offer an “alternative world,” a locus amoenus (or pleasant place), not quite of the here-and-now but recognizably associated. They were greatly sought after by Roman patrons of Claude’s day, including cardinals and popes, and they now grace the great museums of the western world. But nowhere is there a finer, more balanced collection than in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London. From the late seventeenth century, English collectors were avid to acquire the finest examples of Claude’s production in painting, drawing, and etching. What was it about English collectors that caused this enthusiasm, and what in particular do Claude Lorrain’s relatively modest etchings tell us about it? England led Europe in the quest for Claude’s art. The first pair of his paintings arrived there in 1644. As early as 1682 there were three paintings by Claude in the sale of Sir Peter Lely’s London estate, and three from another commission are mentioned in a Whitehall sale of 1686. Before 1720, Thomas Coke (1st Lord of Leicester) bought the first of his eight Claudes, adding others in about 1750, paintings still to be seen in the famous landscape

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room at Holkham Hall, Norfolk. In his catalogue of Claude’s paintings, Marcel Roethlisberger writes: “Claude’s greatest influence was undoubtedly in England in the 18th and 19th centuries.”1 He names such prominent English collectors as the Lords Grosvenor (Dukes of Westminster), Sir Peter Miles, Desenfans, Walsh Porter, John Julius Angerstein, Sir George Howland Beaumont, William Wells of Redleaf, Lord Northwick, the Munros of Novar, and the Lords Northbrook. The greatest coup by an English collector was undoubtedly the acquisition by the Second Duke of Devonshire in about 1728 of Claude’s Liber Veritatis, or “Book of Truth,” in which the artist had recorded virtually his entire production of paintings. No comparable documentary record is known for a seventeenth-century artist. The bound book contained a series of 195 drawings after Claude’s own paintings, designed to authenticate them against imitations by unscrupulous painters in Rome and elsewhere.2 These inspired drawings, among the greatest treasures of early modern European landscape art, were kept at Chatsworth House until they were transferred to the nation by death duties and placed in the British Museum in 1957. Other collections of Claude’s drawings were made by English connoisseurs, such as the Earls Spencer at Althorp House and Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824); Knight’s collection, now in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, is probably the finest anywhere. As we will see, the existence in England of so many of Claude’s best paintings, drawings, and etchings had a remarkable effect on the art and craft of reproduction as the English art public expanded and improved its “taste.” This book includes a range of English graphic art inspired by paintings, contents of the Liber Veritatis and other drawings, and Claude’s own etchings, which found their way into English collections or were published in London from 1816 to 1826. Claude’s appeal was overwhelming, giving English art a new sense of direction. It primed the application of English artists and poets to their native landscape. As Neil MacGregor writes, “in no country has [Claude Lorrain] been so highly and consistently esteemed as in Britain, where admiration for his work is quite simply one of the key facts of our cultural history.”3 Without Claude, could England have produced painters such as

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Claude Lorrain’s Etchings in England

Richard Wilson, Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W. Turner, and John Constable, and poets like Thomas Gray, John Keats, and James Thomson? The entire picturesque movement in travel, landscape design, and gardening depended upon the reception of Claude, Poussin, and Rosa, with Claude the leading influence. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Claude tutored the English in how to see their landscape, how to envisage its natural wonders in terms of classical mythology and imagery. He was their chief mentor in landscape and, to some extent, in architecture, not only of Neo-classicism but also of the Romantic sensibility that subsequently gripped the English. For two centuries, the Claudian aesthetic sensitized the English to their varied countryside, directing sensibility to what had not before been so acutely seen. The so-called “Claude Glass” was an English optical invention for viewing landscapes as if they were Claudian compositions. Consequently, the countryside was made over by William Kent and his followers, whose sensibilities were re-attuned by exposure to Claude’s version of antique Italy. Claude’s infusion of mythic power into landscape reaches as far as the environmental movement of today. Why should this have occurred in a country never seen by Claude, an artist who was born in Chamagne (situated in an independent dukedom now in France) and who lived most of his life in Rome? Claude reinforced a pre-existing Christian humanism at the core of English culture. Sparse as are examples of Christian themes, biblical events are nonetheless represented throughout Claude’s work, while his humanism, drawn especially from Ovid and Virgil, is strongly developed. The ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome fascinated him, and so did living nature where he spent many hours of attentive observation. The naturalism of topography, trees, and vegetation makes his bucolic scenes convincing, from shepherds and shepherdesses attending their flocks to the exploits of Aeneas, mythic founder of Latium. This naturalism, resulting from his acute observations of changing light on landscape, and sometimes on water, is also variously found in English poetry predating Claude’s influence – from William Langland’s Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Henry Vaughan’s

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Silex Scintillans, Andrew Marvell’s garden poems at Nun Appleton House, and others too numerous to list. To cite one contemporary prose work, Izaak Walton’s ever-popular Compleat Angler (1653), it might be said that its melancholic, contemplative mood exactly matches that of Claude’s typical pastoral scenes. English literature, especially in its early modern phase, is attentive to wonders actually observable in nature, not merely reported or theorized in the manner of the proto-scientist Francis Bacon. The English literature of Claude’s time thus often had an element of nature mysticism about it, finding evidence of the divine light of Genesis and St John’s gospel in the natural terrain. In other words, the English were attuned to and ready for Claude’s messages, which combined classical and Christian themes set in the natural world: a rich source of enlightenment and solace. Claude’s own wistful and melancholic temperament was a perfect match for what was likewise said to be the typically English temperament. His quizzical, somewhat worriedlooking contemporary portrait (see frontispiece), heading up the Liber Veritatis, recalls the orphan at age twelve who had set out uncertainly to find his fortunes and, with the help of relations and apprenticeships, eventually prospered in Rome. He is said to have been reserved, always peaceable, a quietist in the animated, often contentious, life of Roman artists. Claude never married but had a stable household, including a daughter. While Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, in Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (1963), do not fully agree with the psychiatrist Jentsch’s view that Claude “suffered temporarily or even constantly from depression,” I do believe that Claude had a vulnerable, depressive temperament – one that needed guarding and compensation.4 He was a melancholic whose sufferings were successfully counteracted by his exceptionally creative gifts as an artist. While Claude’s biography of childhood loss was unknown to his English patrons, they fervently responded to the wistful longing for something elusive, something beckoning and almost within reach, that is recognizable in most of his pictures. The enchanted land of a “golden age,” evoked by Virgil and enhanced, for example, by Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia and the mythic biblical Eden (so powerful in Milton’s account in book 4 of Paradise Lost), exhibits much in common between the Roman artist and his English public.

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There seem to have been converging pathways leading to the cultural amalgamation of visual with verbal accounts of a golden age: “a paradise within thee happier far,” as Milton wrote of Adam and Eve’s only hope after expulsion.5 Claude gave this inner paradise the visual referents latent in Milton’s epic poem. His several versions of the peasant dance reinstate the sundered harmony of Milton’s fallen Adam and Eve. The stereotypically English melancholic temperament found most credence during the period of Claude’s reception. The epic fall from Paradise, the stuff of melancholy, extended its hold into eighteenth-century poetry and painting. Milton had been preoccupied with mood disorder, opening Allegro with “Hence loathed Melancholy” and hailing “divinest Melancholy” in Il Penseroso, contrasting temperamental types: the terrors and pleasures of those “born under Saturn.” Robert Burton earlier studied these contrary states in his extraordinarily popular Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which was published in five editions during the author’s lifetime. The Anatomy has never been out of print and is regarded by some as the most important book ever written by an Englishman. This is no accident, as the most persistent early theorizing about melancholy, or depression, is English – from Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy (1586) dealing with correction of “Perturbations and afflictions of the mind” to George Cheyne’s The English Malady (1733). Cheyne explained: “The Title I have chosen for this Treatise, is a Reproach universally thrown on this Island by Foreigners, and all our Neighbours on the Continent, by whom nervous Distempers, Spleen, Vapours and Lowness of Spirits, are in Derision, called the english malady.”6 The reasons adduced for melancholy’s prevalence (especially among “the better Sort” in England) are moist air, variable weather, rich food, and crowded life in towns, all of which leads to “gloomy thinking” and “Despondency and Darkness on the Imagination.” Surely Claude’s subtly illuminated, airy, and spacious evocations of southern climes would strongly appeal to persons suffering low spirits. Claude’s pictures were more than trophies brought from Rome by affluent travellers on the “grand tour.” They were sought after by sensitive connoisseurs as talismans of the fullest realizations, to date, of European

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civilization, and they were put on display during an age in which Robert Adam designed some of the finest new Georgian houses. A case could be made that their prominence in such sophisticated settings induced and maintained bucolic moods, and took the viewer outside the architectural enclave into Nature whence the primal forces of life in a “golden age” had their rise. Transport into the classical past was reviving and invigorating to those who read Ovid, Virgil, and Horace. Landscape gardening had a tonic effect on low mood for both gardener and viewer.7 Claude’s wistful melancholy for a glimpsed earthly paradise seems to have touched just the right note for many English, who hoped to revive an ideal classical past in their damp, fog-bound island – where low spirits were always a risk. These remarks help to account for Claude becoming, for the select few, the eighteenthcentury’s favourite painter; but what of the commercial urge to produce, in quantity, his imagery for a growing clientele who not only wanted to emulate their betters but to share in the cultural riches provided by artists? As access to private collections was limited, some means was needed for reproducing their images. New technology cut both ways, imperilling traditional life and livelihood but also offering improved aesthetic ways to accommodate to change. A double phenomenon should be noted here: the rise of the English Industrial Revolution from the mid-eighteenth century, which caused alarm among those who saw it marring the familiar landscape and supplanting traditional ways of rural life, but also provided improved technological means of spreading aesthetic pleasure. In the present instance of print- and bookmaking, new printing techniques ensured that a higher quality of reproduction could be achieved, and finely illustrated books made available, at affordable prices, to an enlarging market. For a brief time these factors found equipoise as, for example, in the exquisite products of Josiah Wedgwood’s Etruria pottery, which combined classical “taste” with the most advanced industrial methods and still retained aesthetic integrity. The same was true in Georgian architecture, building, and cabinet-making. In printmaking, a hitherto impossible scale became achievable by such masters as Francis Vivares (1709–1780), William Woollett (1735–1785), and James Mason (1710–1783). Their engravings after Claude caught the attention of the most sophisticated clientele.

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Claude Lorrain’s Etchings in England

Some of these engravings are as large as small paintings and have an astonishing tonal range. They became a mark of good decor. As Elizabeth Manwaring writes: “No person of taste could be without a collection of prints.”8 Probably the most aesthetically satisfying attempts to represent Claude’s art are Richard Earlom’s (1742–1822) renderings in etching and mezzotint of the drawings in Claude’s Liber Veritatis, as published in London by the enterprising John Boydell (1720–1804). Two hundred inspired plates, of almost uniformly high quality, were published in 1777; a third volume of disparate drawings, without quite the same consistently high quality, was published in 1819. There followed other successful publishing ventures, such as W.B. Cooke’s Beauties of Claude (1825) and Frederick C. Lewis’s Liber Studiorum (1840), both finely reproducing some of Claude’s choice drawings from English collections. While the latter cannot be called “popular” publishing, Lewis’s books in particular reveal the technical excellence that the London book trade could attain: fine paper, typeface, binding, and quality of plates. The Industrial Revolution administered a shock that awakened the sensitive in England to what they were losing. Admittedly, some also gained financial means to obtain more and better cultural goods. For instance, the extraordinary collection of original Claude drawings assembled by Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824), and donated to the British Museum of which he was a Trustee, was paid for by an inheritance from iron mining. Knight could see only too well what was happening to English landscapes around him and, along with such literate rural gentry as Uvedale Price and William Shenstone (1714–1763), sought to mount a preservationist aesthetic inspired by Claude. But the socio-cultural standoff between “progress” and nostalgia for a lost England was severe, and it cannot be said that conservative Claudians had much of a chance, except as antiquarians and aesthetes. T.S. Ashton describes how, in about 1760, industrial trade and agricultural innovation “surged up with a suddenness for which it is difficult to find a parallel at any other time or place.”9 It should be remembered that the fine volumes of prints after Claude by Earlom, Cooke, and Lewis were published in the midst of the largest social upheaval England had ever known. Industrialism swelled cities at the expense of traditional life in villages and

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the countryside. Migrations to places of new employment fractured lines of relatedness and seasonal continuity. As the historian Peter Laslett wrote, impersonal economic forces overtook people’s lives as “the economic transformation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries destroyed community altogether in English rural life.”10 Under the factory system, mass society took shape. It may not be too much to suggest that these volumes of bucolic prints, recalling a charmed Virgilian golden age, were seen as an antidote to the social and aesthetic horrors of industrialism. Not that displaced agrarian workers ever saw the prints; the elegant calf-bound folio volumes were destined for country house libraries and possibly for the shelves of the newly rich industrialists themselves. The Claudian landscape aesthetic persisted through the Industrial Revolution until the critic John Ruskin denounced it in Modern Painters to champion the more dynamic art of J.M.W. Turner.11 Turner’s early art emulated Claude’s and, in about 1797, he painted an idealized Claudian picture of the limekiln at Coalbrookdale. Lime burning evidently held a fascination for Turner and in this otherwise peaceable picture one sees early signs of the sort of atmospheric turbulence and energy that was to reappear, magnified, in such industrial-age paintings as Rain, Steam and Speed (1844). The kinetic forces Turner captured were those of the Industrial Revolution itself, which swiftly changed areas of the midlands from rural beauty to urban industrial ugliness. A struggle ensued between prevailing aesthetic norms and the new social reality. There are several depictions of the Shropshire Quaker Darby family enterprise at Coalbrookdale (founded in 1709). Artists were torn between the exceptional natural beauty of the Ironbridge Gorge and the fiery effluxes and noise it produced as successive generations of the Darby family developed the technology of coke for making iron. By 1768, blast furnaces and charcoal forges were producing highgrade iron for the first cast iron rails that made possible the railroads developed by other Quakers. Technology overwhelmed the prudence and restraint of its makers and, along with social upheaval, a whole new artistic sensibility was necessitated. Images of the increasingly famous Coalbrookdale enterprise came into demand. Francis Vivares was the first to represent it comprehensively in a print, Vivares being among London’s most suc-

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cessful interpreters in engravings of paintings by Claude Lorrain. John Boydell in London published popular views of the nearby Severn River at Madeley in 1788 (more than a decade earlier, Boydell had been the successful entrepreneur who published Earlom’s mezzotints after Claude’s Liber Veritatis). Thus Coalbrookdale and its surroundings became a testing ground for a new art of landscape that could comprehend both sides of Edmund Burke’s The Sublime and Beautiful, both the Stygian horror and the tranquil beauty of unspoiled nature. English Claudianism would be stressed to its limit, weakened, and eventually supplanted – but only after a surprisingly long hold on the imagination. Claude’s original etchings had a mixed reception when first brought to England from Rome by persons returning from the “grand tour.” Full acclaim even for masterpieces was slow, failing to arrive until the nineteenth century. Scholarship was even slower. Only with Lino Mannocci’s scrupulously thorough The Etchings of Claude Lorrain (Yale University Press, 1988), superseding all previous catalogues, did the etchings finally come together in a documentary statement about their dates, states, papers, quality of printing, and whereabouts. Mannocci’s exacting work makes it possible to accurately judge prints, establish groupings, and see thematic unities with connections to drawings and paintings. Always subordinated to drawings and paintings, the sporadic production of etchings, at first by Claude himself from his own press, made them appear disparate, unlike the cumulative Liber Veritatis drawings. Undoubtedly English travellers would find one here and one there in print sellers’ stalls, never seeing their strength as sets and larger thematic groupings. They were, however, noteworthy enough to be mentioned occasionally, as in the Notebooks of the Royalist Richard Symonds (1617–1692?) who was in Italy in 1650 and 1651. Symonds was especially on the lookout for landscape subjects and mentions owning a print by Claude, calling it only “boates & people.”12 Let us hope that this was not a storm scene but one of Claude’s great harbour scenes: Le soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun] (1634) [Plates 13 and 14], Le Port de mer au final [Harbour Scene with a Lighthouse] (circa 1638–41) [23], or Le Port de mer à la grosse tour [Harbour with a Large Tower] (circa 1641) [28]. Such choice prints came to England a few at a time, undoubtedly with related

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masterworks known to be there at an early date. It was probably not until the early eighteenth century that enough of Claude’s etchings were available in England to paste them into albums. Mannocci gives evidence for such albums with Claude prints on similar paper. He reports seeing one album grouping of Claude etchings, marked on the spine with the crest of the Earl of Leicester, Sir Thomas Coke (1697–1759).13 When early impressions are found in England, they are likely survivals from such album collections, not to be confused with new impressions made in London from 1816, when many of the copper plates first mysteriously arrived in good enough condition to resume printing. Who knows how the first etchings by Claude Lorrain were conveyed to England? The Earl of Arundel’s print collection contained no example, but perhaps his protégé, the brilliant printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar, brought some early examples when he arrived in 1636. A “first arrival” is unlikely ever to be known, but we do know that the gentlemanconnoisseur John Evelyn (1620–1706) was certainly aware of Claude’s etchings; having resorted as a civil war Royalist to the continent, he pursued cultural interests until it was safe to return home. A noted diarist, Evelyn was also author of Sculptura: or the History and Art of Chalchography and Engraving in Copper (1662), the first English study of prints and printmaking. This remarkably systematic and disciplined study presents “Claude of Lorrain” among Matthias Bril, the Sadelers, Roland Savery, Henri Mauperche, Jacques Fouquiers, the Perelles, and others in a chapter called “An Idea of a fine Collection of Prints.” Claude is placed in the right company, including the French, but fuller consideration should have suggested a class apart. In later editions (which Evelyn did not see) he is mentioned as “Claudio Gille, of Lorrain, 1600–1682” in the appendix of Eminent Painters, yet is missing in alphabetical lists of engravers and sculptors. In Evelyn’s view, landscape prints were of minor status in comparison with historical subjects and portraits, with the Neopolitan Salvator Rosa enjoying special favour in the scant discussion of landscape.14 Claude appears not to have caught the connoisseur’s eye – even though Evelyn was to become a noted landscape gardener and early environmentalist, writing in Silva about the “sacredness and use” of standing groves.

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Claude Lorrain’s Etchings in England

The earliest English critical opinion of Claude’s prints is, strangely, offhand and indeed unfavourable – despite some of the highest words of commendation for his art as a whole coming during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, from such Englishmen as Richard Graham and Jonathan Richardson. Graham wrote that Claude “was universally admired for his pleasant and most agreeable invention; for the delicacy of his colouring and the charming variety and tenderness of his tints; for his artful distribution of the lights and shadows, and for his wonderful conduct in disposing his figures, for the advantage and harmony of his compositions.”15 Writing in 1715, Jonathan Richardson the elder (1667–1745), echoed Graham’s word “delicate” while subordinating Claude’s landscapes to those of Poussin and Rosa: “Nicolas Poussin was truly Great, and Graceful … Salvator Rosa’s Landscapes are Great, as those of Claude Lorrain are delicate.”16 “Delicate” may not be a very high commendation, nor does it reveal the close observation of a connoisseur who owned drawings by Claude, who had examined at least some Claude paintings, and who had access to others in Rome. Yet Richardson, himself a painter of portraits, had a trained eye and may not have thought it necessary to state all his criteria for making these judgments. The English were just developing a critical vocabulary for art, perhaps excusing Richardson’s rather bluntly generalized evaluations.17 There is no doubt that they were influential, and that he set a prejudice against the etchings that led to the following conclusion by art historian Michael Kitson: “Even in the eighteenth century, when the Claude mania was at its height, his etchings were considered an inferior part of his oeuvre.”18 It is easy to see why the prints were widely undervalued, given Richardson’s critical estimate – stated with his customary unflinching directness – of Claude’s etchings in An Essay on the Knowledge of Prints, and Cautions to Collectors. He wrote: “The etchings of Claude Lorrain are below his character; there is often good composition in them, but nothing else; his execution is bad, there is a dirtiness in them disgusting, his lights seldom well massed, and his distances only sometimes observed; his talents lie upon his pallet, and he could do nothing without: Via Sacra is one of the best of his prints, the trees and ruins on the left are beautifully touched, and the whole would have been pleasing, had the fore-

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ground been in shadow.”19 One wonders how many of Claude’s forty-four accepted etchings Richardson actually saw, and from what states he made this damaging judgment; but he does not say, citing approvingly only one print as “Via Sacra,” by which he meant the large print now titled Le Campo Vaccino [The Roman Forum] (1636) [17]. This was Claude’s only cityscape, thus lacking his characteristic pastoral theme. Criticism of the etchings for their free and spontaneous execution is not backed up by comparisons with other artists of whom Richardson approved, nor does he cite which etchings he is stigmatizing as “dirty” and “disgusting” – by which he must have meant unfinished around the margins, showing scratches and inky blotches. Indeed blemishes are present on some, but not all. Prints from the early 1630s, and decreasingly on prints from the 1640s onward, showed Claude’s improved skills. If Richardson’s standard of neatness was comparable to that about to be demonstrated by English reproductive engravings of Claude’s paintings – by such artists as Vivares, Mason, and Woollett – he should have said so. These engravers prided themselves on a clean-cut technical excellence foreign to Claude but very acceptable in the eighteenth-century drawing room. But there is no such declaration, nor could Richardson have known that later most admirers would much prefer Claude’s messy spontaneity over the high finish of the eighteenth-century London prints so admired by Horace Walpole, Alexander Pope, and the circle to which Richardson belonged. Further, subsequent criticism of the prints says just the opposite about Claude’s inspired use of sunlight and its expressive illumination of objects, along with his innovations in the handling of receding space. Claude’s genius is for sunlit horizons and a display of light far more convincing than anything previously achieved in printmaking. Richardson simply missed the visual message in Claude’s etchings, faulting them without due consideration to their aesthetic reinforcement of drawings and paintings. Indeed, being colourless, the etchings epitomized formal discoveries that were sometimes not so evident in the presence of colour. The etchings select and concentrate Claude’s best and most moving visual discoveries, and they are a far more intimate record of his struggle to see essentials in nature and humankind than some of the celebrated large canvases. The

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etchings are a sort of self-contained sonnet sequence aligned to, but not necessarily invoking, the paintings that were intended for formal display and public admiration. Richardson’s mistake about the etchings would not be so serious had he been a less influential figure, or had other merits in his criticism been lacking. As it was, Richardson said many memorable things about the arts such as: “The great and chief ends of painting are to raise and improve nature; and to communicate ideas; not only those which we may receive otherwise, but such as without this art could not profitably be communicated; whereby mankind is advanced higher in the rational state, and made better; and that in a way easy, expeditious, and delightful.”20 While Claude’s etchings meet all of these criteria, Richardson’s actual pronouncement upon them would poison the well of criticism for a long time to come. In An Essay upon Prints (first edition 1768) William Gilpin repeated Richardson’s very statement, almost word for word, thereby backing a critical prejudice without reconsidering its flaws. Gilpin even added a new critical outrage – “his trees are heavy” – that could not be further from the truth.21 Had comparison been made with, say, the admired “foliage of trees” in the prints of Antoni Waterloo, Claude could not have been so stigmatized for his judgment in how to render trees. Every tree in the etchings has a reason for being the way it is, and inspection of Claude’s drawings quickly shows how varied and eloquent his resources for imaging trees actually were. Gilpin was never generous in portioning out praise over blame, and in Landscape Painting: A Poem, he swings at Claude with a blow so severe that one wonders why he felt so much antipathy toward him. The lines are: “Think how claude / Oft crowded scenes, which Nature’s self might own / With forms ill-drawn, ill-chosen, ill-arranged, / Of man and beast, o’er loading with false taste / His sylvan glories. / Seize them, Pestilence, / And sweep them far from our disgusted sight.”22 Less argument than attack, which presumably includes Claude’s etchings, Gilpin seems to want to drive rival Claude from the field of credible aesthetic mentors. In fact, so powerful had Claude’s landscape aesthetic become by Gilpin’s time that he felt he wouldn’t be

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listened to until Claude was set aside. Gilpin wanted to originate the picturesque, not reinvent it. Much the same would occur with the critic John Ruskin in the coming century, when again one senses a rival whose powerful aesthetic could not be dealt with fairly but only attacked. Gilpin and Ruskin wanted to assert their own visions and voices but, unfortunately, they beset Claude’s etchings with an unfair negative appraisal that would take a long time to replace with the wonder and admiration they deserve. Claude’s etchings were the most vulnerable point at which to attack his art when, to some, it seemed to have become annoyingly dominant. No doubt this was because these critics are unlikely ever to have seen together their entire number in sequence, or even the distinctively bucolic etchings. While select prints by Claude must have found their way to London amongst the estimated half million migrants arriving during the eighteenth century from Italy, France, and the Netherlands, few, if any, full runs could have been assembled. Claude’s thematic development, together with improving skills, went unappreciated. Most collections exclude the several commissioned ceremonial and set-piece Roman works: Les Feux d’artifice, Le Fountaine de Neptune, Atlas supportant le monde, La Tour carrée, La Tour ronde, and Le Statue equestre du roi des romains, all from 1637. The extreme scarcity of these uncharacteristic prints shows them never to have been numerous; they are found today only in such historic print collections as the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Museum. The prints actually from Claude’s hand, so valued by contemporary collectors and circulating in the market ever since, may have been intended as pairs, or numbered sets, but there is little evidence that they were ever sold that way.23 The albums containing Claudes that belonged in country house libraries, such as those at Holkham and possibly Stourhead, were assembled by collectors rather than print sellers. More needs to be known about these and other similar albums. It is by no means clear that the superb collection of Claude’s pastoral etchings in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings was always together. The Transcript of the Catalogue of the Drawings and Prints in the Cracherode Collection simply reads “Case V, Hh. Claude Lorrain” without an inventory of contents.24

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Claude Lorrain’s Etchings in England

Yet a look through these examples of printmaking positions Claude among a very select company of master landscape etchers, which certainly includes Rembrandt. This became evident with the nineteenth-century growth of printmaking in England. Not only artists themselves, but also writers on art looked again at the etched legacy of Claude Lorrain, concluding it to be second to none. No doubt the late eighteenth-century publishing success of Richard Earlom’s plates after Claude’s Liber Veritatis had a tonic effect on the confidence of English etchers, who were thus moved to reconsider his original graphic work. While attempts to copy the Claudian idiom could be risky (evidenced by the varied success of Jean Jacques de Boissieu in France), his power to inspire was felt. In his Catalogue Raisonné of Dutch, Flemish, and French painters (Part the Eighth, 1837), John Thomas Smith introduced his list of more than 400 paintings by Claude mainly in English collections: “Above all, the high quality of his genius is best discovered, in the selecting of objects of the most pleasing forms, tastefully grouping them together, so as to produce, by the various combinations, a scene replete with the most enchanting beauties.”25 The comment extended to Claude’s etchings, of which Smith included a descriptive list of thirty-eight (based on A.P.F. Robert-Dumesnil’s Le peintre graveur francais, Paris 1835). Smith was himself an etcher, dealer, and later the British Museum curator of prints and drawings, whose taste in landscape was largely formed by Claude. Arthur M. Hind wrote of Claude in 1908 that “his best plates are incomparable works imbued with a feeling for the romance of rural life seen amid the classical associations of the Campagna.”26 Claude was a “naturalist at heart,” Hind believed, who would have felt more at home in the nineteenth century. In 1907 the critic Roger Fry had remarked that Claude was “singularly open to impressions of general effects in nature,” yet “his world is not to be lived in, only to be looked at in a mood of pleasing melancholy or suave reverie.” Claude is for “contemplative and undemonstrative people,” being “the most ardent worshiper that ever was of the genius loci.”27 It was this upswing in critical opinion that gave English geniuses in etching, such as the surgeon and etcher Sir Francis Seymour Haden (1818–1910), the

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confidence to work freely from nature, seeking the genius loci. Haden’s print collection contained many fine impressions of Claude’s etchings, along with works by Rembrandt and other works of seventeenth-century masters. Claude’s work has long had his eloquent advocates who yet acknowledged its lack of tangibility, even disconnectedness, in his view of nature, Claude not being a strictly observational naturalist in the sense that Ruskin approved. Claude was a beguiling fabulist, and one needed to keep a hold on outward reality while looking at his pictures. William Hazlitt put it well, writing: “his trees are perfectly beautiful, but quite immovable; they have a look of enchantment. In short, his landscapes are unequalled imitations of nature, released from its subjection to the elements, as if all objects were become a delightful fairy vision, and the eye had rarefied and refined away the other senses.”28 This dreaminess appealed in the nineteenth century in a way it had not to Richardson and Gilpin. Philip Gilbert Hamerton caught this sense: “I am able to remember … in boyhood, [when] I looked over a collection of engravings, the Claudes always stopped me and set me dreaming about lands where the trees were always grouped majestically or beautifully, and seas where ships sailed into ports adorned with princely architecture, and the sunshine fell softly on the foreground or glittered on the harmless waves.” Hamerton reported Claude inducing “a condition of passive imagination.”29 For comparable reasons, Claude enjoyed the highest reputation with romantic visionary artists, including the remarkable William Blake and his inspired follower Samuel Palmer. They took from him permission to release creative imagination against the reign of reason, which, they felt, had stultified art in the pronouncements of Sir Joshua Reynolds and his like. Ruskin excepted, new critical support for Claude’s etchings strongly emerged in the late nineteenth century and has never since declined. Critics at last appreciated Claude’s art for its unique merits, which his eighteenth-century detractors had missed. In his book on Landscape (1885), Hamerton wrote: “The essential superiority of Claude Lorrain over all his predecessors and nearly all who have come after him was the quiet elegance of his taste, which is conspicuous in nothing so much as in the arrangement of his sylvan com-

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positions.”30 Ten years earlier Hamerton had allowed that while Claude may not have been so accurate an observer of nature as a nineteenth-century naturalist might wish, “his superiority as an etcher is chiefly a technical superiority; he could lay a shade more delicately, and with more perfect gradation, than any other etcher of landscape; he could reach rare effects of transparency, and there is an ineffable tenderness in his handling.”31 Hamerton continued, “add to these qualities a certain freedom and spirit in his lines, which served him well in near masses of foliage, and a singularly perfect tonality in one or two remarkable plates, and you have the grounds of his immortality as an etcher.”32 According to Hamerton, among Claude’s etchings are “half-a-dozen masterpieces, which the severest criticism must respect,” with seven named: (1) Le Bouvier [The Cowherd] (1636) [18 and 19]: “for technical quality of a certain delicate kind this is the finest landscape etching in the world. Its transparency and gradation have never been surpassed”; (2) Le Soleil levant (1634) [13 and 14]: “the sky is marvellously tender, and in this respect undoubtedly the finest ever etched”; (3) Le Troupeau en marche par un temps orageux [The Herd Returning in Stormy Weather] (1650–1651) [30]: “one of Claude’s best”; (4) La Danse villageoise [The Village Dance] (circa 1637) [22]: “a striking if unsuccessful experiment, except in its first state”; (5) Scene de Brigands [Landscape with Brigands] (1633) [10]: “a brilliant study in contrasts of trees, distance and sky”; (6) Berger et bergere conversant [Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape] (circa 1651) [29]: “free and grand in manner”; and (7) La Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance] (circa 1637) [20 and 21]: remarkable for “the manual freedom in the foliage.”33 Excepting the first two masterworks, this might not be everybody’s choice of Claude’s finest etchings, yet it at last gives evidence of actually looking at them. Hamerton gave his expertly attuned visual attention to selected states of Claude’s etchings and, had he considered more of them, he would have been compelled to still greater admiration. As it is, a new model of how to appreciate and understand Claude’s subtle art was set up and has served well ever since. George Grahame’s Claude Lorrain Painter & Etcher (1895) opens with a credible facsimile of The Brigands as frontispiece, and discusses Claude’s development as an etcher.

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Grahame commends Georges Duplessis for publishing in Paris Les Eaux-Fortes de Claude Lorrain (1875), containing facsimiles by M. Amand-Durand. When unmarked with their maker’s red monogram, however, these facsimile etchings could have been passed off as originals when they reached England. Grahame the critic mainly endorses Hamerton’s judgments. His opinions are fully consistent with those offered by Mme Mark Pattison in Claude Lorrain Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres (1884), which also sought to rehabilitate Claude’s neglected and under-rated graphic work. While critical of Claude’s less skilled early etchings, such as La Tempête [The Tempest] (1630) [5], Grahame praises The Herdsman as the supreme masterpiece it is: “With the genius of a true poet Claude had compressed into a few square inches all the charm of Virgil’s Eclogues, all the beauties of pastoral life. Stately trees, fragrant meadows, a serene sky and a silvery river combine to form an ideal home for man and bird and beast.”34 Acknowledging Ruskin’s successful demotion of Claude as Europe’s reigning landscape artist, who had so colonized the English imagination, Grahame rightly pleads for appreciation of “beauty and grace” in Claude’s art. Beauty and grace spring from “the poet’s soul”: not, perhaps, our language but reminding us too of what is so easily missed amongst the more insistent, even strident, idioms of early modern art. Claude’s is the meditative voice of a quietist, always at risk of being drowned out in the surrounding din. The high reputation of Claude’s etchings established by Victorians was maintained through exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s. The Art of Claude, organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1969, exhibited six etchings, along with many drawings and paintings. The etchings are criticized for not realizing Claude’s greatest gift of rendering atmosphere and light but without mention of Le Soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun] (1634) [13 and 14] or Le Bouvier [The Cowherd] (1636) [18 and 19], which are unique achievements of atmosphere and light not found in any drawing or painting. Nevertheless, the etchings selected for display were of the highest quality and kept alive an awareness of this side of Claude’s achievement. The catalogue’s most valuable feature is Michael Kitson’s introduction, in which he called Claude “one

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of the great introverts in the history of art,” developing the idea that “the first quality necessary to the enjoyment of Claude is patience,” as he is not an artist “who offers instant sensations,” but requires “opening oneself to the harmonies in which he specializes.”35 Paul David Lewis’s “The Etchings of Claude Lorrain,” published in The Connoisseur in 1972, set out to correct the “neglect” of Claude’s etchings, offering an historically informed and well-illustrated discussion of their uniqueness. Like Hamerton, Lewis actually conveys the visual experience of looking, one by one, at etchings. Yet Lewis’s is not a comprehensive study, nor does it acknowledge the unity of Claude’s production in this mode. Renewed scholarly interest in the etchings informs H. Diane Russell’s Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682, an important exhibition catalogue reflecting new enquiry and critical assessment. The territory is covered with discussions of states, thematic significance, historical significance, and the whereabouts of etchings, although she gives too much credence to the theory that Claude copied Jacques Callot’s prints of The Miseries of War. Nonetheless, her claim that Claude’s etchings are “remarkable in many respects and worthy of particular attention” is well supported with discussion and good quality illustrations.36 It is, however, Lino Mannocci’s masterful The Etchings of Claude Lorrain (1988), dedicated exclusively to the etchings and more than ten years in preparation, that gives authority to Claude’s entire production of 44 etchings from 1630 to 1663. With an artist’s eye and a scholar’s sense of how scrupulously to weigh information, this volume, generously produced by Yale University Press, sets a standard unlikely to be surpassed. Working principally in the British Museum and Paris collections, Mannocci had before him the best surviving examples anywhere of Claude’s etchings to compare with holdings in other museums. Anyone who has had the privilege of viewing the astonishing collection of Claude’s prints in the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum will appreciate what a “gold standard” of printmaking actually is. Perhaps having seen and handled these examples perhaps makes one look with an excessively critical eye at all other Claude prints. But it also confirms that the highest aesthetic merit should be accorded this line of Claude’s endeavour, and that the etchings should be appreciated for themselves rather

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than as mere adjuncts to drawings and paintings, however closely related in theme. For the fullest appreciation of Mannocci’s catalogue raisonné, consult the generous and graceful review by Michael Kitson.37 No longer are Claude’s etchings taken for granted or casually subordinated to his drawings and paintings. It is true, however, that a full critical study taking historical and stylistic bearings has yet to be attempted. A working hypothesis of special achievement in printmaking, more limited in subjects but akin to Rembrandt’s, and of the prints as a cohesive statement in their own right, is needed. Meanwhile, the existing scholarship ensures that Claude’s etchings enjoy high regard and are included in recent studies such as J.J.L. Whiteley’s Claude Lorrain: Drawings from the Collections of the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum (London: British Museum Press, 1998) and Richard Rand’s Claude Lorrain – The Painter as Draftsman (Yale University Press, 2006). While the latter publication is a catalogue to exhibitions in San Francisco and Williamstown, Massachusetts, fullest appreciation of the art of Claude Lorrain, together with the finest survivals of that art, remains in the United Kingdom. In America, Claude is a charming curiosity, whereas in Britain he is fundamental to the very culture. Claude was indeed an English “obsession” that even the present technological age, with its abrasive post-modernity, cannot banish. Wherever the countryside retains hints of a “golden age,” of a better rural past, there Claude’s magic endures. The English landscape garden is a lasting tribute to the Claudian aesthetic.

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pl ates

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1 Claude Lorrain L’Apparition [The Vision], circa 1630 (etching on laid paper, state 1b or 1c, 10.5 cm
17.1 cm)

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2 Claude Lorrain L’Apparition [The Vision], circa 1630 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 10.5 cm
17.1 cm)

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3 Claude Lorrain Le Pâtre et la bergère [The Herdsman and the Shepherdess], circa 1630 (etching on wove paper, state 2, 15.3 cm
10.8 cm)

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4 Claude Lorrain Les Deux paysages [The Two Landscapes], circa 1630 (etching on wove paper, state 3, 5.2 cm
4.8 cm, 5.4 cm
3.8 cm)

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5 Claude Lorrain La Tempête [The Tempest], 1630 (etching on laid paper, watermark: spread eagle, state 4b, 12.7 cm
17.5 cm)

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6 Claude Lorrain Les Trois chèvres [The Three Goats], 1630–32 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 19.9 cm
13.1 cm)

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7 Claude Lorrain La Fuite en Egypte [The Flight into Egypt], circa 1630–33 (etching on laid paper, state 1, 10 cm
16.8 cm)

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8 Claude Lorrain Les Quatre chèvres [The Four Goats], circa 1633 (etching on paper, state 4, 19.5 cm
12.8 cm)

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9 Claude Lorrain Étude d’une scène de brigands [Study with Brigands], circa 1633 (etching on wove paper, only state, 4 cm
7.8 cm)

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10 Claude Lorrain Scène de brigands [Landscape with Brigands], 1633 (etching on wove paper, state 8, 12.5 cm
19.5 cm)

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11 Claude Lorrain La Danse au bord de l’eau [The Dance on the River Bank], circa 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 6b, 12.3 cm
19.2 cm)

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12 Claude Lorrain L’Enlèvement d’Europa [The Rape of Europa], 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 4, 20 cm
26.2 cm)

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13 Claude Lorrain Le Soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun], 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 4, 12.9 cm
19.8 cm)

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14 Claude Lorrain Le Soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun], 1634 (etching on wove paper, state 6, 12.9 cm
19.8 cm)

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15 Claude Lorrain Le Passage du gué [The Ford], 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 2a, 10.3 cm
17 cm)

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16 Claude Lorrain Le Troupeau a l’abreuvoir [The Herd at the Watering Place], 1635 (etching on wove or laid paper, state 2, 10.2 cm
17 cm)

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17 Claude Lorrain La Campo Vaccino [The Roman Forum], 1636 (etching on wove paper, state 9, 19.7 cm
26.1 cm)

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18 Claude Lorrain Le Bouvier [The Cowherd], 1636 (etching on laid paper, state 4a, 12.5 cm
19.3 cm)

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19 Claude Lorrain Le Bouvier [The Cowherd], 1636 (etching on wove paper, state 5, 12.5 cm
19.3 cm)

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20 Claude Lorrain Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance], circa 1637 (etching on laid paper, state 3, 13.2 cm
19.2 cm)

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21 Claude Lorrain Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance], circa 1637 (etching on wove paper, state 5b, 13.7 cm
19.7 cm)

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22 Claude Lorrain La Danse villageoise [The Village Dance], circa 1637 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 19.3 cm
25.6 cm)

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23 Claude Lorrain Le Port de mer au fanal [Harbour Scene with a Lighthouse], circa 1638–41 (etching on wove paper, state 5, 13.6 cm
19.8 cm)

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24 Claude Lorrain Le Départ pour les champs [Departure for the Fields], circa 1638–41 (etching on laid paper, state 3c, 12.6 cm
17.8 cm)

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25 Claude Lorrain Le Dessinateur [Coast Scene with an Artist], circa 1638–41 (etching on wove or laid paper, state 4 or 5, 12 cm
17 cm)

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26 Claude Lorrain Le Naufrage [The Shipwreck], circa 1638–41 (etching on wove paper, state 5, 12.5 cm
17 cm)

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27 Claude Lorrain Le Pont de bois, Rebecca et Eliezer [The Wooden Bridge, Rebecca and Eliezer], 1638–41 (etching on wove or laid paper, state 7, 12.6 cm
19 cm)

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28 Claude Lorrain Le Port de mer à la grosse tour [Harbour with a Large Tower], circa 1641 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 12.3 cm
19 cm)

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29 Claude Lorrain Berger et bergère conversant [Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape], circa 1651 (etching on thick wove paper, state 7, 19.9 cm
26.3 cm)

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30 Claude Lorrain Le Troupeau en marche par un temps orageux [The Herd Returning in Stormy Weather], 1650–51 (etching on laid paper, watermark: fa, state 2c, 15.8 cm
22.4 cm)

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31 Claude Lorrain Mercure et Argus [Mercury and Argus], 1662 (etching on wove paper, state 3, 14.9 cm
21.6 cm)

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32 Claude Lorrain Le Temps, Apollon, et les saisons [Time, Apollo, and the Seasons], 1662 (etching on laid paper, state 5a, 19.8 cm
25.7 cm)

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33 Claude Lorrain Le Chevrier [The Goatherd], 1663 (etching on wove paper, state 2c, 16.8 cm
22.2 cm)

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34 Dominique Barrière after Claude Lorrain Coast Scene with Mercury, Herse, and Aglaurus, 1668 (after Claude’s design of 1643) (etching on wove paper, 19.9 cm
24.9 cm)

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35 Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton after Claude Lorrain Expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, 1734 (etching and woodblock on laid paper, 14.3 cm
21 cm)

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36 Francis Vivares after Claude Lorrain Landscape with Dancing Figures, Engraved from a Picture in the Pamphili Palace at Rome, No. 26, 1766 (etching on laid paper, 49 cm
60.2 cm)

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37 Balthasar Anton Dunker after Claude Lorrain Landscape with Mercury and Argus, 1771 (after Claude’s design of 1660) (etching on laid paper, 15.2 cm
19.1 cm)

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38 Richard Earlom after Claude Lorrain From the original drawing in the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire, No. 11, 1774 (etching with mezzotint tone on laid paper, 20.7 cm
25.9 cm)

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39 Josiah Boydell after Claude Lorrain Self-Portrait, 1777 (mezzotint with engraving on paper, 17.6 cm
12.4 cm)

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40 Samuel Middiman and John Pye II after Claude Lorrain A Landscape, 1810 (etching on laid paper, 21.2 cm
29.8 cm)

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two

Claudian Architecture

The Claudian aesthetic profoundly affected English landscape design and architectural style. The arts were so intertwined that it is essential to notice large-scale attempts to harmonize the visual results of Claude’s way of seeing nature with the very design of structures in their English settings. While painters were freed to see nature in all its beguiling freshness, architects also saw new ways of visually enriching buildings and landscapes. Had not the poet Alexander Pope urged an Horatian “beatus ille” view of the “happy man” content in his small house and large garden, mercifully free of the engorged city? At Twickenham, with its natural Thames River setting, Pope had integrated house and symbolic garden as a tribute to his mother. While the result was “Claudian” in essence, we do not know to what extent Pope was familiar with Claude’s pictures. We do know, however, that his friend the influential architect William Kent (1685–1748), enriched his ideas of poetic landscape by studying Claude’s Liber Veritatis drawings, which had been acquired by the Duke of Devonshire and kept in his library at his Piccadilly house from 1727. Kent was to become the architect of Holkham Hall, Norfolk in 1734, one of the greatest private repositories in England of Claude’s paintings. While they were both attentive to nature, Kent’s formality and landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s (1716–1783) tendency to smooth and level landscapes were soon challenged by more radical Claudians. Prime movers in the later phase of English picturesque Claudianism were the theorists of the picturesque, garden designers, and builders Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824) and Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829). For them Claude and nature were synonymous. Though

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rivalrous, both Knight and Price urged a sweeping away of the sheared, close-cropped landscapes of Kent and Brown, together with the classically regular country houses set in them. They caused a shift away from the Grecian temple and Palladian facsimiles that had been ostentatiously placed in contoured lands with formal planting to a subtly placed, more vernacular sort of building in less tamed settings. While impressively large, these houses were asymmetrical, made up of crenelated structural blocks with square and round towers, much as are seen in the drawings, etchings, and paintings of Claude Lorrain. It is no accident that these aesthetic departures into irregular building coincided with the Romantic movement in literature that looked more to the wild, free, and untamed aspects of nature than to the refinements of classicism, which had been imposed upon it in the heyday of enthusiasm for Greece and Italy. Both classic and romantic, it would be a mistake to label Claude’s sensibility as only one or the other. The English took this new hybrid as they found it. Upon arrival in Italy, Claude had been mesmerized by its decayed rural and Roman urban architecture; there are many drawings in the British Museum that show him to have studied at close range structural forms for their own sake: the drawings numbered eight through forty-three as seen in Marcel Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings (1968) illustrate this, and there are numerous other works by Claude that show careful observation of buildings. Amongst the etchings, one thinks mainly of Le Campo Vaccino [The Roman Forum] of 1636 [Plate 17]. That this rendering of fragmented remains in the cattle market, more literal than fantasy, should have gone through nine states, with many later prints showing extensive plate wear, testifies to the admiration Claude received for the evocation of antiquity. But this etching is uniquely antiquarian (based on drawings 122 and 123, as seen in Rothlisberger 1968), with most edifices in other works being placed in idealized bucolic or waterside settings. Close inspection of the etchings reveals much architectural detail that would have intrigued innovative English aesthetes from architect and dramatist Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) and Knight to such amateurs of the ferme ornée, or decorative farm, as Philip

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Southcote (1698–1758) at Woburn Farm and poet William Shenstone at The Leasowes. In other words, enthusiasts of great means and small were caught by the romantic presence of buildings in Claude’s evocative formulation of the Italian landscape. Failing direct evidence, it is at least worth supposing that the beguiling presence of rural houses and ancient ruins in Claude’s etchings had this leavening effect on Englishmen who were ready to work on their estates guided by this new idea of what to do. Le Temps, Apollon, et les Saisons [Time, Apollo, and the Seasons] of 1662 [32] is a good example of inciting the viewer of the picture’s main foreground action to let his eye move from the distant vista of nature through a gap in the trees, to the cluster of columns and decayed buildings. Nature and man-made structures are thus placed in tension; the buildings are a forceful yet mysterious presence in the composition. They are asymmetrically arranged, much as Knight chose to do in the 1770s while designing Downton Castle, a prototype for the shift in English architectural tastes. A similarly varied cluster of shapes is seen in the hilltop village appearing in the upper left corner of Le Chevrier [The Goatherd] of 1663 [33]. Here the square crenelated tower is prominent amidst other carefully rendered geometric structures. Claude had no need to observe in such detail ordinary rural Italian sights, but he did so to convey a sense of arrested time and Horatian settled contentment. Perhaps the most evocative rural house is seen to the left, beneath ruined columns, in Le Bouvier [The Cowherd] of 1636 [18 and 19]. In this greatest of all landscape visions, the contented man pipes a rural tune, while cows cross homeward over a river. Facing towards his dwelling enveloped in trees, the cowherd is indeed the beatus vir. He needs no grand temple to prove a balanced state of natural awareness, and no seventeenth-century etching spoke – or still speaks – so eloquently of romantic equipoise. There are several other etchings, including harbour scenes, that show Claude’s consistency of interest in towers and rectangular structures, and it must be supposed that these were inspirational in England. Most likely, however, as the primary source of Knight’s idea for Downton Castle was Claude’s small painting of La Crescenza. Knight acquired this work in 1806, but may have first seen it in Earlom-Boydell 1770s mezzotint rendering of

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one of the few pure pen drawings in the Liber Veritatis (Claude’s drawing of La Crescenza is no. 118). This drawing seems to have been preparation for a painting commissioned by a patron of his actual family palace, set in bucolic surroundings. If Knight knew this, it would have spurred his interest in emulation as Downton bears a striking resemblance. Oddly, some time after Knight finished Downton, with its formal classical interior, he chose to move to an altogether humbler dwelling on the estate, perhaps resembling that of Le Bouvier [The Cowherd]. Other evidence is readily found for a Claude-inspired interest in asymmetrical architecture set amidst forests and meadows. Sir John Vanbrugh’s Seaton Delaval Hall, built in Northumberland from 1720–28, clearly renders in stone Claude’s famous painting Landscape with Psyche and the Palace of Amor, or The Enchanted Castle (1664). This extraordinary vision of a mysterious and forbidding castle (actually that of Cupid) set at the seaside with the melancholic figure of Psyche seated in the foreground entered an English collection in the 1770s and is now in the National Gallery. It was widely known by way of Earlom’s Liber Veritatis mezzotints, of which it is no. 162. When the architect John Nash (1752–1835) and the landscape designer Humphrey Repton (1752–1818) arrived on the scene, Claudian picturesqueness became the dominant guide to English taste. Of course, both were more pragmatic than ideological in how they went about their commissions, but they were guided by the precepts of the Claudians Knight and Price. By the end of the eighteenth century, Repton and Nash had transformed rural and urban England, including areas of central London. Rugged yet refined picturesque landscape re-contoured the countryside and an Italianate sensibility rebuilt townscapes. While each was an aggressively innovative designer, Nash with his Regent’s Park scheme, for example, and Repton with his inspired Red Book landscape prospectuses, they never lost a Claudian sensibility. Throughout this period the Claudian aesthetic was repeatedly reinforced and stimulated by large engravings from famous paintings and by the successful publication of the so-called third volume of the Liber Veritatis – a misnomer as its images are from assorted drawings, not the celebrated visual record Claude had made of his own paintings.

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A glance through volume 3’s miscellany (published 1819 but issued in parts from 1802–17) shows a wealth of traditional Italian village buildings, with their round and square towers, together with ruined standing columns, ancient winding track ways, and bridges. It is easy to see how this romanticized crumbling, yet still majestic, stonework of antiquity could have produced canons of picturesque taste in England. It led garden designers to the cult of ruins, to agreeably placed temples and monuments, along with graceful stone bridges crossing meandering streams. From Henry Hoare’s Virgilian Stourhead and Thomas Hope’s The Deepdene to villas in St John’s Wood, London, the “Englishness” of English taste, as the architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner characterized it, was drawn from the ancient world and its renaissance admirers. The cultural resource was easily transported as printed media: etchings and engravings. Paintings and drawings came too, but these were mainly held in private. There is no doubt that such masters as Piranesi left their mark, but the leading agent was undoubtedly Claude Lorrain whose prints and drawings were avidly collected, then reproduced for wider circulation. Of course, there are other candidates for transmission of Italian imagery and fantasy: the numerous charming prints by the Parisian Perelle family, not to mention those of earlier Netherlandish travellers to Italy. Amongst the latter should be mentioned Cornelis Poelenburgh (1586–1667) and Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1599–circa 1659), who no doubt inspired Claude himself to study ancient architecture. But their modest etchings would have been little known in England. It is possible that a few masterful prints by the Dutch traveler to Rome, Karel Dujardin (1622–1678), found their way to England. Dujardin etched landscapes with ruins encountered as he went overland to Rome in the early 1650s; these plates contain some of the most evocative imagery ever produced. Also to be considered are Herman Van Swanevelt’s (1600–1655) many architectural and landscape vistas, with beguiling symbolic features, derived from wanderings in the environs of Rome. These etchings and drawings are of exceptional interest, especially as Van Swanevelt was a frequent companion of Claude who likely taught him about etching technique and who had also reinforced in him a certain

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reverential pantheism. But it is hard to believe that many prints by Van Swanevelt circulated in England, though surely his name would have been known from a few rare examples. It is to Claude Lorrain we must return as the prime inspirer of the bucolic landscape aesthetic that swept through the English eighteenth century, thinning out only with the Victorian gothic revival. Urged on by Claude’s detractor, John Ruskin, a strain of medieval Gothic revivalism came into vogue replacing refined and unobtrusive classicism. Nevertheless, England’s most sophisticated high culture is unthinkable without the masterworks of Claude, the unassuming visionary who originated a vocabulary of the imagination unique in the annals of painting from nature.

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The range of Claude’s achievement as a draughtsman and painter, from Claude’s own etchings to commercial prints reproducing his designs, is quite exceptional. No other seventeenth-century landscape painter inspired so much effort to disseminate images to an eager public. The initial effort was Claude’s own, followed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with English examples of his reproductive prints, which were produced to satisfy a burgeoning market for images of idealized nature and related subjects. This activity asserts England’s key place in advancing the Claudian aesthetic, as Italian and French prints after Claude are fewer and sometimes not of comparable quality. It should also be noted that the best French engravers after Claude tended to work in England. Later photogravure facsimile prints of Claude’s etchings, such as the heliographs by AmandDurand published in Paris in 1875, must also have found their way to England, but their debasing technology marks a decisive break with the art and craft of etching as traditionally understood and examined in this book. While “engraving” is used as a generic term for all prints made from metal plates, the distinction is kept here among engraving, etching, and mezzotint (until the early nineteenth century, most prints were made from copper plates). Engraving is understood to mean the art of drawing, or writing, usually on metal by incised lines. The incised surface is inked, wiped, and printed onto a suitable paper. In etching, lines are freely drawn onto a plate through a prepared gum or resin ground, and the image is evoked by immersing the plate in acid to deepen and make permanent the varied lines; after inking, the plate is

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printed in a press onto fine paper. Mezzotint results from the plate being first prepared with an overall burr, which is engraved and scraped to produce light lines and tonal areas in a dark background. Claude was exclusively an etcher, while later craftsmen reproducing his work for publication tended to use engraving and mezzotint along with etching. Helpful definitions of these terms are found in Ian Chilvers’s Oxford Concise Dictionary of Art & Artists and for technical explanations, Antony Griffiths’s Prints and Printmaking. 72

c l au d e’s e t c h i n g s Claude’s etchings are compositions in their own right, though thematically related to drawings and paintings. They are much more than miniature black-and-white versions of the gallery-size paintings commissioned by his patrons in Rome and elsewhere. As the largest numbers of etchings are from the 1630s, it is possible that these early ones were promotional; but since several of the greatest etchings are later, self-promotion cannot have been their primary motive. Like exemplary artists from the Duchy of Lorraine, such as Jacques Callot (1592/3–1635) and Jacques Bellange (circa 1575–1616), Claude was fascinated by the etching medium itself. He therefore placed great emphasis on the potential of etching for conveying visual ideas that, in some cases, have their fullest realization in that medium. The viewer will notice a certain restless, searching quality in the etchings, some sketchy and seemingly incomplete while others appear more formal and conclusive. Nearly all of the etchings are believed to be based on preparatory drawings, though occasionally Claude worked with the etching needle directly on a copper plate as in Le Pâtre et la bergère [The Herdsman and the Shepherdess] (circa 1630) [Plate 3]. Such a fresh and spontaneous print exemplifies beginnings in the 1630s, several of the masterpieces being achieved in that decade, while successive efforts show his increasing confidence and refinement. By about 1638–41, Claude had full control of the medium, producing such vital prints as Les Départ pour les champs [Departure for the Fields] (circa 1638–41) [24]. Then, for unknown reasons, there was a hiatus, with resumption in 1650–51 with the astonishing

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The Herd Returning in Stormy Weather [30] (plate no. 40 reproduced in Mannocci 1988), surely one of the greatest achievements in the entire seventeenth-century history of etching. There followed other outstanding larger plates: the Virgilian idyll Berger et bergère conversant [Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape] (circa 1651) [29], which took a lot of revising to get right, as Mannocci explains in detail;1 the eloquent Mercure et Argus [Mercury and Argus] (1662) [31]; the Poussinesque Le Temps, Apollon, et les saisons [Time, Apollo, and the Seasons] (1662) [32]; and finally Claude’s moving farewell to etching, Le Chevrier [The Goatherd] (1663) [33]. Here, the long incubating and contemplative beatus ille ideal is openly declared, with Claude, like Prospero, about to cast away his magic though not quite, as there were many great drawings and paintings to come.2 It may have been that the precision, dexterity, and acute eyesight needed for such work were in decline but, like all artists, Claude would not have wanted anything less than his best. Claude mentions forty-one copper plates in the inventory of his will, together with a printing press, which was kept at his house in Rome. Seventeenth-century impressions of any of the etchings are extremely rare, and are more likely seen in museum collections than on the print market. In the early eighteenth century, twenty-eight of Claude’s plates are known to have been in Paris, and many fine impressions were made, some of them migrating to England. It is possible that all plates, apart from the Feux d’Artifice (thirteen plates etched in Rome in 1637 recording festivities for the coronation of Ferdinand III of Hungary as King of the Romans) were in Paris by the middle of the eighteenth century (the Feux d’Artifice prints are reproduced in Mannocci 1988, plate nos 21–33). As Lino Mannocci explains, later in the eighteenth century a new inscription beginning with ‘N’ or ‘P’ appeared in the lower margin of sixteen of the original twenty-eight plates. He thinks these plates were by then in England. By 1816, many of Claude’s plates were with the London publisher J. McCreery, with twenty-five Claude prints of good quality appearing in A Collection of Original Etchings (200) (London: J. McCreery, 1816). This selection (twentythree of which are actually Claudes, two others being after Claude by the hand of Dominique Barrière [1622–1678]) went into several editions by successive London publishers.

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The final collection, still printing reasonably well from the copper plates, appeared in 1826. Until recently, these prints were readily obtainable in the print trade; it is impossible to tell from which publisher, whether McCreery, G. Schultze, or some other, prints removed from volumes actually came. The rule is that final states will have been published in a volume of the 200 etchings. Some of these prints reached the market on very thin chine paper stuck on stiffer backing sheets, while others are on a thicker wove paper, which still accepted ink with little loss of definition. However, reworking of the plates took its toll and it may be that the copper plates finally perished (for a general account, see Mannocci’s Etchings 1988: 27–8). An object lesson in how plates wore away is found in the series Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance] (1637) [20 and 21], with the fifth to seventh states in London printings showing serious loss and futile reworking. The plates of Claude’s etchings disappeared without trace as mysteriously as they had first come to London. p r i n t s r e p r o d u c i n g c l au d e’s d r aw i n g s a n d pa i n t i n g s First among the succession of printmakers who reproduced Claude Lorrain’s drawings and paintings was his contemporary in Rome, Dominique Barrière (circa 1622–1678). Barrière was a professional engraver who is the only known artist to have had Claude’s permission to reproduce his designs. As is well known, Claude had trouble with copyists, so giving Barrière exclusive rights was no small acknowledgment of his ability. Coast Scene with Mercury, Herse, and Aglauros (1668) [34] reproduces plate no. 70 in Claude’s Liber Veritatis, which in turn records a painting of 1643 in the Rospigliosi-Pallavicini Collection, Rome. Michael Kitson explains that Claude made two drawings of this painting expressly for Barrière to reproduce as an etching.3 The result was one of five such etchings faithfully reproducing Claude’s original designs, while other landscape etchings by Barrière are free adaptations of Claudian themes unmistakably of his own contriving. Barrière’s prints after Claude were brought to England possibly as early as the seventeenth century.

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The first English exponent of reproducing Claude was the Londoner Arthur Pond (1701–1758). The print Expulsion of Hagar with Ishmael of 1734 [35] aims to reproduce Claude’s drawing Expulsion of Hagar of 1668 (drawing no. 173 in the Liber Veritatis), but Pond rather freely re-interprets some of its detail.4 Nonetheless, the print is an important innovation making a similitude available to English buyers of prints and drawings. It was etched, then tinted using pear wood colour blocks, and fixed to a large backing sheet before binding. Impressions were successfully made as late as 1807. This etching is from A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawing’s (London 1778), facsimile plates depicting Dutch and Italian old master drawings in British collections. The original drawing was from the collection of Richard Houlditch (d. London 1736) and probably acquired by Pond for his own extensive collection. An energetic publisher, Pond, together with Charles Knapton (b. 1698), went on adding prints of drawings and paintings until finally coming out with the highly successful four volume Italian Landscapes (1741–48). This stylish set of volumes firmly implanted Claude and other landscape artists in the English imagination. Pond was also London’s principal importer of prints from the continent, thereby becoming a leading Georgian tastemaker. In Claude Lorrain: The Paintings (1961), Marcel Roethlisberger writes: “More than that of any other artist in the history of painting, Claude’s influence in England affected not only the painting but a whole mental attitude towards landscape.”5 For this reason English patrons craved large engraved reproductions of Claude’s landscapes. Their range and varied appeal is startling, with the best of the engravings meant for framing and display in fashionable Georgian rooms. Roethlisberger notes that Claude’s fame may be judged by the large number of engravings for such displays made between about 1750 and 1850, the leading artists being Vivares, Canot, Mason, Wood, Woollett, Peak, Fittler, and Lerpiniere.6 Francis Vivares’s (1709–1780/2) Landscape with Dancing Figures (1766) [36] is among the very best of the large, ambitious engravings after Claude’s landscape paintings. It reproduces, with minor alterations, the pagan Landscape with Dancing Figures (The Mill),

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a painting in the Doria-Pamphili Gallery in Rome believed to be of 1648 rather than the almost identical biblical Landscape with Isaac and Rebekah (1648) in the National Gallery, London. The Earlom/Boydell etching/mezzotint, reproduced in this text, was made from Claude’s drawing no. 113 in the Liber Veritatis, which is after the latter painting. Vivares’s engraving reverses the painting, adding in the background a large antique temple with a smaller round temple in front of it. Working in England, Vivares published this engraving himself, inscribed in both English and French with a view to export. This sumptuous print has always been in England, where it was acquired. The Sunrise (Coast Scene) of 1771 is an early example of John Boydell’s London publication of prints after the paintings of Claude Lorrain; the engraver was Pierre Charles Canot (circa 1710–1777), a Parisian settled in London. The rising sun is seen as a naturalistic source of light, which may also be taken as a spiritual agent if we follow such archetypalists as the historian of religion Mircea Eliade. Rothlisberger catalogues this small oval painting on copper as one of a pair recorded in 1771 but long lost (Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, vol. 1, no. 306, 546; vol. 2, fig. 374). In his Catalogue Raisonné (1837), John Smith wrote: “Engraved in 1771 by Canot, from a picture in the possession of Sir Richard Lyttleton,” but Smith had no further information as to its whereabouts.7 While the picture does not appear in the Liber Veritatis, its authenticity has not been seriously challenged. A superb example of English printmaking is Frederick Christian Lewis’s (1779–1856) Temple of Apollo, an etching with contemporary colouring. It was made in 1809 and published by John Chamberlaine (Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London) in Original Designs of the Most Celebrated Masters of the Bolognese, Roman, Florentine, and Venetian Schools (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1812). The large print corresponds in most respects with the drawing View of Delphi with a Procession (Liber Veritatis 182), which relates to a painting of 1673 for Cardinal Massimi now in the Art Institute of Chicago. In the two preliminary drawings (as seen in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, 1057–8), the

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temple, paying tribute to the sun, is adjusted with respect to the procession below. By 1840, Lewis had made an equally successful series of reproductive plates of Claude’s forest drawings that convey spontaneity as well as formal finish. A slightly later specimen of an English decorative print after a painting by Claude is the steel engraving A Landscape (1810) by Samuel Middiman (1750–1831) and John Pye (1782–1874) (published in London by William Miller) [40]. This print is based on an oval pastoral landscape on copper of about 1647, whereabouts unknown, and the last known owner was the Earl of Dartmouth. There is no corresponding mezzotint because Claude did not record such oval compositions in his Liber Veritatis. Nevertheless, like the Vivares, this print is a thoroughly English product of a culture that valued landscape images as part of decor (for reference and a reproduction of Vivares’s engraving, see Roethlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, vol. 1, 466–7 and vol. 2, fig. 195). As is well known, Claude’s Liber Veritatis, a bound sketchbook in which the artist recorded most of his paintings in miniature, found its way by 1728 into the collections kept at Devonshire House, London and at Chiswick, residences of William Cavendish, Second Duke of Devonshire, and his successor the Third Duke. The album was later housed at Chatsworth, the great house in Derbyshire and seat of the Cavendish family, before being donated to the British Museum. In his scholarly edition of 1978, Michael Kitson outlines the vicissitudes of the Liber Veritatis, an album dismembered and re-mounted page by page before its arrival in England.8 It is perhaps no accident that this masterwork of landscape art should end up in England, where its powerful effect on the imagination led to the virtual idolatry of Claude. It was only a matter of finding the reproductive means of making its wonders available to an enlarging public, which Richard Earlom (1743–1822) hit upon in collaboration with the London publisher John Boydell (1720–1804). Succeeding Arthur Pond, Boydell was London’s most successful tastemaker and promoter of the classical landscape aesthetic exemplified by Poussin and Claude. In the 1760s, he commissioned

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a number of important engravings from English sources, and as a print dealer working through Pierre-Francois Basan in Paris he imported many fine European prints. Among them, in all likelihood, were good states of original etchings by Claude. Earlom was a no less remarkable figure. During his career, he is estimated to have produced more than 500 engravings, seventy portraits, sixty mezzotints, and many book illustrations. He was at the height of his powers when Boydell proposed engraving the Liber Veritatis and other drawings totalling 300 plates and published in three volumes (1777– 1819). Earlom’s innovation was to represent pen lines by etching and washes by mezzotint, printing the result in sepia ink, to achieve rich and painterly tonal qualities. The result is unique. Less the sort of facsimile print that Pond aimed at, and lacking the detailed precision of Vivares’s engravings, Earlom’s plates are freer interpretations of Claude’s images, a sort of inspired co-creation in dialogue with them. Earlom’s work is saved from oddity by his evident understanding of, and sympathy with, the essence of Claude’s use of light and atmosphere. There were certainly critics of Earlom’s departure from Claude’s drawings, but many more patrons and buyers approved of and admired them. As Earlom had been lent the original Liber Veritatis to contemplate and study as he worked in his London studio, it could not be denied that the prints represented an authentic response to a masterwork. The handsome, leather-bound, tall folio volumes, selling at ten guineas, were the pride of many a country-house library; they have been at the top of rare book collectors’ lists ever since. Unfortunately, for commercial reasons many surviving volumes have been dismembered for the prints, and it is rare to see the original title pages and portrait of Claude. The title pages of the first two volumes read: Liber Veritatis: or, a Collection of Two Hundred Prints after the Original Designs of Claude Le Lorrain, in the Collection of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, Executed by Richard Earlom in the Manner and Taste of the Drawings, to which is added A Descrip-

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tive Catalogue of Each Print, Together with the names of those for whom, and of the Places for which the Original Pictures were first painted, (taken from the hand-writing of Claude Le Lorrain himself on the back of each drawing) and of the present possessors of many of the original pictures. Volume the First/Second (Published by the Proprietor, John Boydell, Engraver, in Cheapside, London, MDCCLXXVII) There is a formal dedication to William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, and also a brief biography with an engraved portrait of Claude Lorrain in the front matter. The prints are individually dated 1774, 1775, 1776, and 1777. A third volume, originally issued in parts from 1802–17, was published in 1819. Its prints do not derive from the Liber Veritatis but from an assembly of various drawings in English collections. About a quarter of these drawings are by artists other than Claude; those by Claude himself vary in quality, but a number of stunning plates appear in this volume. That such a supplementary volume was assembled shows how sought after Claude’s prints had become. The success of Earlom/Boydell was bound to bring emulation, the chief example being The Beauties of Claude Lorraine (London: W.B. Cooke, 1825). William Bernard Cooke (1778–1855) was an established London engraver and publisher known for picturesque landscape views. Attempting a superior product, he used steel plates, limited to twentyfour, and employed various engravers to execute them. Thus, names of well-known engravers such as Thomas Lupton, John Bromley, G.H. Every, and G.H. Phillips appear in the title lines, though their styles are remarkably consistent. The plates are said to have been “selected from 200 subjects, as the most beautiful and characteristic of this great master; they are engraved from a set of very fine proofs in the possession of the Duke of Bedford.” In other words, the Duke of Bedford’s choice Earlom/Boydell volume prints were copied without recourse to the actual Liber Veritatis drawings. Aware of piracy claims, Cooke wrote that the Duke’s “sincere desire to promote the fine arts in this

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country, generously permitted the publisher to make free use of [his prints] for the present work.” The new volume was stylishly produced in etching and mezzotint with a portrait and biography of Claude signed B.H. (possibly Benjamin Robert Haydon, a noted painter, diarist, and admirer of Claude). Its elegant binding rivals those of the Boydell publishing house but, as far as appears, the announced second part of Beauties of Claude Lorraine, to be published in January 1826, did not materialize. While reception of the first volume needs further study, it may be guessed that the public found its darker, more sombre prints lacking in the rich warmth of Earlom’s. There is no doubting the excellence of craftsmanship, yielding the crisper effect of steel engraving printed onto a smoother card surface than that used by Boydell. But the line is harder than that of Claude’s spontaneous drawing, which was sometimes uncannily captured by Earlom, and the sun’s illumination upon the darkened foregrounds is more studied than spontaneously realized. A claim that Cooke improved on Earlom in the service of Claude would be difficult to make. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many more Claude drawings than those known to Richard Earlom had entered British collections and some of the best had been donated to the British Museum. Richard Payne Knight’s gift of fifteen of the most extraordinary drawings put Claude’s art in a different register from the more or less documentary Liber Veritatis. These are the spontaneous ink and wash drawings made in the countryside around Rome mainly during the 1630s and early 1640s. They are of astonishing intensity, responding especially to forest scenes, viewed sub specie aeternitas rather than naturalistically or topographically. Claude’s observations during frequent rambles in the Roman Campagna sometimes acquired visionary intensity, even numinous feeling, leaving us in no doubt that he was an artist with an unprecedented range of responses to nature. Spontaneous reactions to nature occasionally appeared in earlier European drawings, such as those of Paul Bril, but here was something different, which the English recognized as their own. The culture that produced Wordsworth, Richard Jefferies, and many other Romantics would easily recognize and incorporate such drawings.

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Frederick Christian Lewis, the accomplished London engraver and publisher, took the challenge of reproducing and publishing the best of Claude’s drawings that had been acquired by Payne Knight. Working as “Engraver to the King” from 53 Charlotte Street, Portland Place, Lewis made several attempts to do the impossible: capture the deft lines and tones of Claude’s most sensitive Campagna drawings. Lewis was not so much producing complete pictures in the manner of Earlom as reproducing the spontaneous touch of a master draughtsman at his most selective and succinct in the presence of living nature. That Lewis was fully serious about this appears from successive publications: beginning in 1797 and 1808, he attempted seventeen of Claude’s drawings from the Royal Collection, published by J. Chamberlain as a collection including other artists’ drawings (Keeper of the King’s Medals and Drawings, London: Bulmer & Co., 1812). Imitations of Claude Lorrain, containing forty drawings from the British Museum and published in 1824, had fifty-two more added in 1826; these were republished together in 1837. In 1840, Lewis’s definitive effort was the Liber Studiorum of Claude Lorrain, Engraved from the Drawings in the British Museum: 100 plates, four parts in one tall folio volume, with separate title pages for each section. The cumulative nature of Lewis’s enterprise is confusing, as he attempted to set “before the public eye” the choicest of Claude’s drawings, and it must be admitted that some engravings are better than others. The impressions are not always crisp and bright, and title lines are hard to read, but it was a noble effort. Despite minor faults, Lewis’s 1840 volume of Claude’s drawings could hardly be a more elegant example of sophisticated bookmaking. The plates are not the drawings but they come uncannily close. p ort r aits Seventeenth-century portraits of Claude Lorrain generally agree about his appearance, but differ as his character. Later portraits follow their prototypes, again with differing interpretations. Josiah Boydell’s Claude Lorrain, a sepia mezzotint of 1777 [39], which heads

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volume 1 of Earlom/Boydell’s Liber Veritatis, is the reverse image, in an oval enclosure, of a portrait one would like to think Claude himself drew. But in fact it was based on an engraving made by R. Collin of Antwerp, from a drawing by Joachim von Sandrart (1606– 1688), who was Claude’s first biographer. Sandrart’s drawing is of a melancholic young Claude in ordinary clothing, and was certainly made long before 1675, the date of publication. As Sandrart said, he made this portrait from life (no doubt when he knew Claude in Rome between 1628 and 1635), so it cannot be Claude’s self-portrait.9 That Claude accepted without alteration Sandrart’s image for use as frontispiece to the Liber Veritatis testifies to its veracity. Josiah Boydell (1752–1817), the publisher John Boydell’s nephew, simply reproduced the existing image in etching and mezzotint to be consistent with the volumes’ contents. It would seem that Claude had been happy to see himself portrayed in his early thirties as pensive, perhaps in the attitude of a shepherd, rather than more grandly as Rome’s celebrated landscape artist. This portrayal of the simple, rural Claude forever fixed his identity, deflecting recognition of the highly civilized being he actually was. Engraved variations on this portrait are known. A second engraved portrait, titled Claude, was “engraved by W. Holl from the original in the Musée Royale, Paris” and “published by William Mackenzie, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London & New York” (circa 1833). This interpretation portrays Claude as a romanticized gentleman, no longer a hirsute solitary figure looking more like a shepherd than a townsman; now he is a clean-cut celebrity in Rome. The eyes gaze into the distance, unlike the two rather soulful paintings thought to be the source of this engraving. Neither painting is as severe as Sandrart’s portrait was held to be.10 Both are by unknown artists, one in Rome dated 1682 (Galleria dell’Academia di S. Luca), the other, undated, in the Tours Museum. Roethlisberger gives the closest identification of the engraving: “Ch.-A. Bonnegrace (1808–82). Portrait of Claude, in the museum of Versailles, no. 2896. Engraved by Charles Ginoux; aquatint by Wm. Holl (1807–71); the picture then in the Musée Royale, Paris. Ginoux’s fine engraving corresponds to the S. Luca portrait.”11 Modifications of Claude’s

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Original and Reproductive Prints

melancholic countenance are also found in an anonymous small eighteenth-century portrait possibly made in France for the English market. A few images of a male figure in the drawings and etchings may be self-portraits, judging by Sandrart’s portrayal of the rural Claude. Of course these are conjectural identifications useful only as indicating what the pictures may be about. The most suggestive is a drawing, identified as no. 330r in the British Museum Collection, of a rather large tousleheaded figure, in tunic and leggings holding a staff, and seated at rest beside a stream. A similar sketch figure appears in drawing no. 80v in the Liber Veritatis (vol. 4). Drawing no. 330r became the eloquent plate no. 18 in Earlom/Boydell’s volume 3 (1802), but the herdsman in this attitude does not appear in any painting. Despite the awkwardly massive body, the head and face are sensitively drawn; while no artist’s equipment appears, could this be Claude on an excursion into the countryside around Naples or Rome? The figure conforms well enough to L. Pascoli’s nearly contemporary description of Claude as “well built, of good physical proportions.” Amongst other drawings there are various small, indistinct images of an artist at work, drawing. A sensitively drawn head of a shepherd, who also carries a stick, appears in drawing no. 616v (the British Museum) – again possibly a self-portrait. There is no suggestion as to how the frontal and side views of a woman’s head below on the same sheet relate to the male head. Several drawings of shepherds and shepherdesses were also made, the most striking being nos 687, 692r, and 694 (also in the British Museum), where the shepherd is a satyr. Enigmas of this kind extend to the etchings, for instance the night, or perhaps dawn, piece, Le Passage du gué [The Ford] (1634) [15], in which a bearded shepherd (resembling Claude) with a staff sets foot in a stream with two women about to follow. What this print meant in terms of Claude’s life is only to be conjectured. The many drawings of paired male figures walking the countryside may be identified as Claude with his drawing companions Sandrart or Herman Van Swanevelt (see, for example, nos 443 and 704 of the Liber Veritatis). While Claude certainly pictured such activities, he made no attempt to convey identities, or to make recognizable portraits of any of his male friends.

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Such human figures are subsumed into larger nature, though we may guess at hidden dramas concerning the women who appear here and there in his work. l at e r i l lu s t r at i v e e n g r av i n g s

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By the mid-nineteenth century, the English art-loving public had increased to the point where a similitude of great paintings was mass-produced for the book trade. Between the Royal Collection and the National Gallery (founded 1824) many of the finest Claude paintings were in London. The prints are usually small, dense, and not altogether satisfactory steel engravings of large paintings in these public collections. More illustrations than works of art in their own right, they do display the engravers’ skills in the era just before photography took over. The following examples are worthy of mention: (1) A Sea-Port, Engraved on steel by W. Floyd from a Picture in the Royal Collection (London: James S. Vertue, published in The Art-Journal, 1859); (2) Europa, Engraved on steel by E. Radclyffe from a Picture in the Royal Collection (London: James S. Vertue; published in The ArtJournal, circa 1859); (3) A Sea Port at Sunset, With the Embarkation of St Ursula, From the original picture by Claude Lorrain; (4) The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, Engraved on steel by J. Hensall from the original picture by Claude Lorrain in the National Gallery, No. 12; (5) Italian Seaport, Engraved on steel by JC Armytage from the original picture by Claude Lorrain in The National Gallery, No. 5; and (6) The Annunciation, Engraved on steel by Varrall from the original picture by Claude Lorrain in the National Gallery, No. 39 (Jones & Co., Temple of the Muses, Finsbury Square, London, nd). By the time of such reproductive engravings, commercialism had all but negated the English printmakers’ attempts to convey the wonders of Claude. It was the end of an era when a single artist, Claude Lorrain, giving courage to many others, enriched awareness of seaside and landscape. The cultural gain is still felt to this day.

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Themes in the Etchings

What themes in Claude’s etchings would have been accessible to his contemporary viewers that may need elucidating today? There are four main categories for discussion: the journey by sea and on land, shepherding, dancing, and light. By using contemporary sources, each of these can be brought into better focus in a world where traditional images and archetypes have become obscure. Claude drew upon a fund of shared classical and biblical imagery familiar to his audience. They would not have needed to decipher them, only noting the variations and special emphasis by this particular artist. In other words, Claude’s etchings, belonging to a still unified Christian-Humanist culture, recombined elements in a virtually primordial vocabulary of human meanings. The delight was in apprehending what these re-combinations said about the world to which they corresponded and Claude’s work can be read as a guide to these revealed meanings. the sea journey Contemporaries of Claude who had been to sea, or heard tales of voyaging, would have thought about the perils of storm and shipwreck. Passages by sailing ship could never be taken for granted and reaching safe harbours was a cause for thanking the heavens, or gods of the deep. The seventeenth century has been called “the age of expansion,” when Europe sent its people all over the globe to trade and to colonize. Claude himself made a comparatively short migration overland from his birthplace in Chamagne, Duchy of Lorrain, to Rome, but on a second occasion he took ship at Marseilles “and, finally, after

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having suffered many terrible storms at sea and inconvenience on that long voyage, he was once again in Rome, on the very day of the feast of St. Luke in the year 1627.”1 Thus Claude knew first-hand the risks of sea journeying, and it is little wonder that his earliest dated etching should have been La Tempête [The Tempest] (1630) [Plate 5]. Despite working from a preparatory drawing (as seen in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, plate no. 46), Claude had trouble achieving a satisfactory state of this etching, there being seven variants of his attempts to adjust the contrasts of ships breaking up on rocks, with figures struggling to rescue cargo from the raging sea. The overall agitation and tonal ambiguity convey a sense of desperate peril as if life had descended into primal chaos, yet with the promise of the sun’s orb appearing on the horizon. Le Naufrage [The Shipwreck] (circa 1638–41) [26] is a starker configuration with the same theme, this time fully realized from a drawing (as seen in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, plate no. 196 and Mannocci’s The Etchings of Claude Lorrain, plate no. 35) though it took several states to do so. The theme was repeated, as recorded by Claude’s documentary drawings nos 33, 72, and 74 of his own paintings in the Liber Veritatis, all suggesting disaster yet with light over the horizon. Storms on land also exercised Claude’s ingenuity in Le Troupeau en marche par un temps orageux [The Herd Returning in Stormy Weather] (1651) [30], one of his larger, more finished prints. How derivative were these prints, art historians like to ask? They were and they weren’t: the theme of descent into chaos and rescue is archetypal, taking various forms according to time, place, and the artist’s level of awareness. Several earlier artists, including Claude’s friend the engraver Dominique Barrière, are usually mentioned. Claude’s teacher Agostino Tassi painted such pictures, as did other Italians such as Marco Chiarini and Filippo Napoletano. In a scholarly study of the Dutch and Flemish shipwreck genre, Lawrence Otto Goedde provides a history of prints that record storms at sea.2 While helpful, this information should not take away from Claude’s struggle to come to visual terms with the actual danger of perishing at sea. He was supported by conventions, but the encounter with this stark reality seems to have been entirely his own.

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In another series of etchings, gratitude for reaching safe harbour may be sensed; now the formlessness of raging seas is resolved into contained form. The first of these, Le Soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun] (1634) [13 and 14], is renowned for the uncanny skill with which radiant sunlight is realized, while the other two, Le Port de mer au fanal [Harbour Scene with a Lighthouse] (circa 1638–41) [23] and Le Port de mer à la grosse tour [Harbour with a Large Tower] (1641) [28] are similar evocations of busy but peaceful harbours as Claude must have known them. These are exquisitely miniaturized views, very different in feeling from the grand ceremonial statements of such paintings as Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648) in the National Gallery, London. They also differ from other port scenes such as L’Enlèvement d’Europa [The Rape of Europa] (1634) [12] on an Ovidian theme and Le Dessinateur [Coast Scene with an Artist] (circa 1638–41) [25], which also introduces subjects beyond the port itself. The Liber Veritatis contains thirty-two drawings of busy ports in an organized world contrasting with only three of ruinous storms. Claude did not dwell on terror, nor was he limited by conventions found in prints of ports from Philipp Galle to the Perelles in Paris. Taken together, Claude’s prints, drawings, and paintings show that he brought a new visual acuity to fascination with travel by sea, always with the expectation that lands-of-promise lie over the horizon, typically a horizon aglow with morning sun. Travel by land appears everywhere in Claude’s etchings, and each example would require discussion to do it justice. From Les Deux paysages [The Two Landscapes] (circa 1630) [4] to La Fuite en Egypte [Flight into Egypt] (circa 1630–33) [7] and Le Pont de bois, Rebecca et Eliezer [The Wooden Bridge, Rebecca and Eliezer] (circa 1638–41) [27] journeying prevails, the latter two being biblical. Life is a pilgrimage, a quest, Claude seems to say; but his own part in it is only stated by implication. Again, the perils of travel are probably personal, as Claude himself had been assailed by highwaymen when on foot. The tiny Étude d’une scène de brigands [Study with Brigands] (circa 1633) [9] is a preparatory work for Scène de brigands [Landscape with Brigands] (1633) [10], likely referring to this dangerous event. As the latter is known in nine states, Claude was clearly challenged satisfactorily to adjust its

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complicated tonality. Drawing no. 77 in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings and no. 3 in Liber Veritatis more spontaneously met the challenge. Travel implies landscape, and this, above all, excited eighteenth-century English viewers of Claude’s art, including his etchings. No matter the human subject, tranquil landscape reassuringly lies beyond. Whether it pictures a wayside mugging by bandits or an innocent country-dance, landscape always safely ‘holds’ the event. The overarching palm tree in Landscape with Brigands could be taken to signify Christian redemption, with light flooding in behind. More often, man is in harmony with nature as in Le Troupeau a l’abreuvoir [The Herd at the Watering Place] (1636) [16]. In the incomparable etching Le Bouvier [The Cowherd] (1636) [18 and 19], the cowherd pipes in harmony with all creation. The cowherder sits apart, bathed in light, while the house, ruins, and another herdsman with cattle are in a bosky enclosure across a stream. The composition is so near perfection as to set a standard never surpassed. Clearly, Claude was entranced with the wondrousness of Italian landscape and, in turn, the great English landscape designers, such as William Kent, followed him. Claude offered a visual formula for lifting melancholy and enhancing mood, with English “taste” quickly assenting to its importance. Alexander Pope memorably set the rule: “First follow nature, and your judgment frame / By her just Standard, which is still the same: / Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, / One clear, unchang’d universal Light, / life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, / At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.”3 These lines are a prelude to Pope’s own innovations in garden design at Twickenham, in keeping with new ideas set in motion by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Lord Burlington, and William Kent, the latter two having returned in 1719 from the Grand Tour. When Pope called for landscape designers to “consult the genius of the place,” was he prompted by Claude’s art, which frames and intensifies the “genius” of place? We do not know whether his collection contained any of Claude’s choice etchings, but it is probable. In any case, at Twickenham, Chiswick, Stowe, Rousham, and other gardens picturesque landscape design was being developed. “Picturesque” meant a more or less extensive landscape scene organ-

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ized so it could be regarded as a composed, aesthetically unified picture. Claude was the prime exemplar, as the essayist Joseph Addison no doubt had in mind when writing in The Pleasures of the Imagination that “a beautiful prospect delights the soul.”4 The desired result of enhanced landscape was thus to offer reassurance that the creation was benign and a good place to be, with “solace” and “consolation” common epithets used to describe the experience of Claudian art. Such effects were, in turn, transferred to actual garden and landscape design as environmental mood enhancements. Stourhead, the ultimate masterpiece of an English picturesque garden organized as a circuit, owed its inspiration primarily to Claude. Its maker, Henry Hoare (1705–1785), owned a copy of Claude’s View of Delphi with a Procession (Liber Veritatis 182), which gave him the idea for his Pantheon, designed by Henry Flitcroft about 1754. Did Henry Hoare’s library also contain an album of Claude’s etchings? Again, it is highly likely. Similarly, we would like to know exactly which pictures by Claude had been formative for other garden designers such as William Shenstone at the Leasowes in Shropshire and Charles Hamilton at Painshill in Surrey. Whether designed as a circuit garden, extensive landscape, or ferme ornée, the picturesque English garden was profoundly Claudian, sometimes with a touch of Salvator Rosa’s sublimity or Poussin’s solemn grandeur. Whatever its combined inspirations, Claude led the way as the combination of enclosure and intimacy, compatible with illuminated expansiveness, was his special invention. shepherd and shepherdess The shepherd and shepherdess are earthly pilgrims who travel together, though the shepherd is sometimes seen alone in a contemplative pose. As the chief actors in these etchings, shepherd and shepherdess are the Virgilian personages upon whose fortunes turn Claude’s entire statement in the etchings. Christian connotations of the “good shepherd” are also present, and Claude’s more sophisticated public would not have missed the blending. It should be noted that Claude seeks to balance the sexes, without subordination of one to

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the other. His version of the peaceable kingdom excludes such Virgilian elements as the singing matches in The Eclogues. There is little or nothing of Virgilian variations of male relations in the etchings, or in the Liber Veritatis drawings for that matter; they are uncompromisingly heterosexual. Shepherd and shepherdess, seen alone together in the natural landscape, become the dancing couple in other prints portraying social events. By contrast, two of Claude’s most remarkable prints, Le Bouvier [The Cowherd] (1636) [18 and 19] and his final Le Chevrier [The Goatherd] (1663) [33], are of solitary contemplative “happy men,” recognizably Virgilian and Horatian yet, it seems, statements from Claude’s own experience of solitude in nature. Such figures appear repeatedly in the Liber Veritatis (see nos 11 [1636]; 39 [1639]; 85 [1644]; 97, 98, 101 [1646]; 118 [1649]; 155 [1661]; and 172 [1667]) taking up compositions familiar from such drawings as nos 169 and 795 in the British Museum and no. 848 (1660) in the Louvre. Thus solitary contemplation held special meaning for Claude, which has yet to be explained beyond art emulating art, as indeed was the case of the shepherd in Virgil’s Eclogue I when he speaks of a pagan god allowing “my cows to range/ And me to play what tune I please on the wild reed.”5 A further clue may be that in no. 97 of the Liber Veritatis the shepherd is identified as John the Baptist, and in no. 161 [Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush (1664)], a plate that was to reappear as no. 99 in volume 3 of the Liber Veritatis, and as a subject of several other drawings (nos 921–7). This shift from classical to biblical association tells us that Claude had some personal meaning in mind, though the exact meaning is never specified and no written commentary survives, if there ever was one. In this book, further interpretation is posited in the section on “light.” Here it is enough to say that Claude had ample observational experience of shepherds and shepherdesses in the countryside near Rome on which to draw. Virgil almost certainly had been in mind, yet such a scene became commonplace to Claude on rural peregrinations. Shepherds were responsible people doing an essential task in the rural economy of the time, and they deserved admiration. Claude was no doubt also referencing the “Golden Age,” spoken of by Theocritus and later Horace in his Second Epode,

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an era when life was pure and simple, free from political strife and human suffering. Cities held nothing for shepherds; indeed, revisions of Berger et bergère conversant [Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape] (circa 1651) [29] to remove a city in the background show Claude making up his mind that the good life is rural and that he needn’t underscore the contrast. He was prepared to entertain dramatic complications in Arcadia, as in the enigmatic Le Passage du gué [The Ford] (1634) [15], and he wasn’t averse to portraying the working day of shepherds, as in Les Départ pour les champs [Departure for the Fields] (circa 1638–41) [24]. What Claude really wanted to say is masterfully summarized in his large plate Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape. This etching is a significant re-interpretation of Liber Veritatis no. 23 of 1638 in which the figures are differently aligned, and again adjusted in Liber Veritatis no. 116 (1648), no. 121 (1650), and no. 153 (1661). As noted, states 1–3 (as seen in Mannocci no. 41) had an elaborate town with a church tower visible through a gap in the trees, but in states 4–7 the tower is replaced by a hillside. The reclining figures remain the same throughout: they face one another with the female gesturing her left hand towards the moving cattle. On a closer look, however, she actually points to the rising (or possibly the setting) sun. Tending their animals rather than mixing in worldly affairs, shepherd and shepherdess thus live “in the light,” enjoying perfect accord with each other in the natural order. It is noteworthy that in several of the etchings the females are presented full-face and well lit, while the males in profile are shadowed. Altogether in Claude’s pictures males tend to be pre-occupied with work while females appear more open to the world around them. t h e da n c e Claude’s renderings of “dance” range from what might readily be observed on certain ceremonial occasions in the Italian countryside to a sophisticated symbolic tableau understood by only the few. Some are seemingly observations of actual events, while others, such as Le Temps, Apollon, et les saisons [Time, Apollo, and the Seasons] (1662) [32], are startlingly

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symbolic in the manner of Poussin. Les Quatre chèvres [The Four Goats] (circa 1633) [8] is mentioned in this context only because the goats appear to be dancing, a feature of animal contest that Claude may have wanted us to keep in mind as he portrayed humans dancing in other etchings. In Landscape with a Country Dance (1640–41) (no. 53 in Liber Veritatis and no. 122 in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Paintings), he depicted a harmoniously dancing couple while, alongside, two butting goats cause a third to fall over a cliff, conveying something about harmony and discord. Initiates of pagan mysteries could well have taken these etchings as an archetypal evocation of the primal cosmic dance, a myth of creation and the risk of destruction made deceptively mundane. The dancers in La Danse au bord de l’eau [Dance on the River Bank] (circa 1634) [11], Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance] (1637) [20 and 21], and La Danse villageoise [The Village Dance] (circa 1637) [22] are, however, ordinary male and female peasants engaged in primitive erotic ceremonials, or open-air dancing contests. Michael Kitson points out in a note to Landscape with a Country Dance (1637) (Liber Veritatis 13), that the subject is “pairs of dancers competing for a trophy and a piece of cloth hung from a tree,” which may have been suggested by some rural festivity such as “the wedding of the oak.” This ritual still takes place in a modified form on 8 May each year in the forest of Monte Fogliano, near Vetralla.6 The earliest of Claude’s country-dance series, Danse au bord de l’eau [Dance on the River Bank] (circa 1634) [11] is a finished landscape composition, while the multiple prints of the same title, Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance] (1637) [20 and 21], are sketchier but very lively vignettes. It is almost as if the highly finished early plate was to be a miniature, composed very like a painting and useful for a traveler to take back to his home country. No painting, however, fully corresponds and the drawing (no. 78 in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings) gives setting without figures (see no. 13 [1637] in the Liber Veritatis, no. 650 in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, and no. 50 [1637] in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Paintings; also the heroic The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca [1648] [Liber Veritatis no. 113]); and The Mill with its companion piece

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Landscape with Dancing Figures, both of 1648, continue the theme. It should be noted that Francis Vivares’s large engraving of 1766 is based on the latter. In the etching, themes of time and timelessness in the ritual dance are reinforced by the turning water wheel situated between the solid buildings; the body of water is calm while the figures are dynamic. It seems that Claude especially valued this plate, which comes down to us in seven states. Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance] (1637), the small etching based on drawing no. 131 as reproduced in Rothlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, is also in seven states, showing perhaps the greatest range of tonal variations of any etching by Claude. While he was not responsible for all of them, they illustrate the struggle for the clearest possible visual statement. The large plate, no. 20 as reproduced in Mannocci’s The Etchings of Claude Lorrain, is even more a record of technical struggle to secure a satisfactory image, a kind of proto-mezzotinting, which led to the plate’s fragile surface being quickly eroded. Yet even thus diminished, these rare prints retain a distinctive charm. These three etchings undoubtedly derive from what Claude had seen and heard amongst rural folk, but also echo Virgil’s Georgics, book 1 (2: 11–12): “Come, Fauns and Dryad maidens, dance together: Yours are the gifts I sing.” Le Temps, Apollon, et les saisons [Time, Apollo, and the Seasons] (1662) [32], however, is entirely inspired from a mythologically informed imagination: it summarizes Claude’s attempt to turn the dance into a sort of platonic metaphor of order in the universe. Now the dance is not a rural ceremony, a competitive mating ritual, but a joyous allegorical procession of the seasons led by the sun god Apollo who is obedient to the harp music of time. Apollo was also the Greek god of song, known as “the dancer,” not to mention his roles as the god of poetry and medicine. The picture is lit by sunlight through a gap in the trees above the dancing group, while Chronos, or Father Time, sits heavily upon a rock, above which on the horizon are the ruins of time. It is likely that Claude himself provided the caption, realizing his departure into myth might puzzle some of his devotees. Claude must have been looking at Poussin’s Dance of Human Life (circa 1639–40), a close-up of the seasons with Apollo, the sun god,

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above in a chariot. But Poussin’s was a fully allegorical vision of cosmic harmony, while Claude kept his embodied mythological figures grounded in a more open nostalgic landscape. Poussin’s picture brings the eye back to its figures while Claude’s etching draws the yearning eye outward into the distance beyond.7 the light 94

Baldinucci remarked on Claude’s “various and most beautiful observations … of nature, of the changing and varying of air and light, all things were such that they ravish the spirits of those who look upon them.”8 Evocation of light is the distinguishing feature of Claude’s etchings. No other artists had the visual discernment and dexterity with the etching needle to realize the effects of radiance seen throughout his production. Examples have not been listed because almost all are planned exercises in the effects of light on land or sea. Of course, Le Soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun] (1634) [13 and 14] is often mentioned as a miracle of the etcher’s art, but several others are also deserving of special notice, including the enigmatic Le Passage du gué [The Ford] (1634) [15], which is more likely to be a scene at sunrise than a nocturnal. Each and every etching by Claude asks the viewer to pay special attention to the distribution of light and deftly won subtleties of atmosphere. Claude’s light is not that of the coruscating Baroque skies in Rubens’s etchings, nor does it rely on intense local effects to emphasize dramatic incidents; Claude’s light produces neither the exaggerated effects of Counter-Reformation art nor the emphatic Biblical theatrics of Rembrandt’s interior scenes. Light in Rembrandt’s landscapes is closer to Claude’s but also tends to be more dramatic, as in The Three Trees (1643) with its streaked clouds descending over bright sunlight. Rembrandt, too, was an acute observer of varying natural light that is sometimes more than earthly. Claude creates a still more mysterious light, invested with meanings beyond those discerned in the art that most influenced his own.

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Art historians accept several precursors of Claude’s distinctive use of light. Mention of them takes nothing away from Baldinucci’s remark about direct observation of nature, but it is certainly true that Claude saw possibilities in the work of earlier artists. Paul Bril (1554–1626) was a Flemish landscapist who flourished in Rome from about 1575, drawing, painting, and also making a few etchings. Bril tended to intensify landscape into fantasy by piling up a multitude of features – figures, architecture, mountains, turbulent clouds, and radiant suns – more than would ever appear to ordinary observation. Light is always a pronounced feature of Bril’s paintings, and his etchings of Roman ruins are also brightly illuminated. Bril influenced Agostino Tassi (circa 1580–1644), a Roman landscape artist more inclined to expressive realism than to fantasy. Tassi broke from Mannerism and its variants into a refreshing observation of nature. He was also adept at picturing classical buildings, which may have prompted Claude to invent the architectural capriccios so frequently added to harbours and other scenes. For five years, beginning about 1620, Claude worked for Tassi as a servant and pastry cook in his household, during which time Claude not only learned from Bril’s disciple but also is likely to have met Bril himself. Notorious for bad behaviour, Tassi was sometimes in prison, and Claude’s relationship with him was no doubt strained. It is likely that Claude’s early style and choice of subject matter was influenced by the painting of Filippo Napoletano (circa 1585–1629). The frescos in the Quirinal Palace, Rome (attributed to Napoletano) are believed to have made an impression on the young Claude as they showed him how to arrange the repoussoirs of trees and bushes. Napoletano’s art may also have introduced Claude to the thrill and terror of depicting storms at sea, and to the fascination of peasants dancing. As Marco Chiarini compellingly shows, Napoletano’s use of suffusing light, as in Sunrise, an oil-on-copper of 1620, is a likely starting point for Claude’s innovations.9 Napoletano’s radiant work is certainly more naturalistic than Bril’s, and more richly varied than Tassi’s, but at this remove in time it is difficult to judge amongst these and other influences. Perhaps a summation of them is all one should assert.

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As an ardent and impressionable seeker, Claude is bound to have looked at everything that came his way. This could well have included the work of Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), a German from Frankfurt who in 1600 settled in Rome. Elsheimer, a painter of beguiling landscape miniatures, was exceptionally sensitive to the use of light, especially in nocturnal scenes. He also made a few etchings, though his work is best known through engravings by Hendrick Goudt (1573–1648). While Claude may not have known them all, it is tempting to think that at least he saw the remarkable Goudt engraving after Elsheimer: Aurora (1613). Ann Sutherland Harris asserts that “Claude … certainly had Elsheimer’s ‘Aurora’ in mind when he painted the ‘View of the Campagna from Tivoli’ (1645).”10 Indeed he may have seen it earlier when considering, for example, how to handle illumination in such etchings as Les Trois chèvres [The Three Goats] (1630–2) [6] and Le Fuite en Egypte [The Flight into Egypt] (circa 1630–33) [7]. These and other etchings display much the same suffusing glow of new light. More certain is the influence of the painter Gottfried Wals (1590/5–1630/3), a native of Cologne who died young in Naples. Wals is also likely to have known Elsheimer’s work, having sympathy with its bright, yet remote, strangeness. Like Napoletano and Elsheimer, Wals was a Stoic, living apart from the world and skeptical of its ways. This must have appealed to Claude who studied with him for two years in Naples before joining Tassi’s household in Rome. Wals had been Tassi’s assistant from about 1613 to 1618 when his master beat him. Thus Claude was forewarned yet must have remained convinced that there was something to learn from direct contact with Tassi’s poetic realism. It is hard to say what he took away from Wals, unless it was the utter simplification of landscape for the study of light. For example, in A Country Road by a House (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), Wals brought light through the aperture described by blockish buildings on the left and a small building beneath a large tree and other shrubbery on the right. Two figures are illuminated while another is in shadow. Two-thirds of the lower arc remain in shadow, the whole composition being circular. It is a stunning performance, whose subject is light from the sky, the sun itself being remote. Had Claude seen this painting, he would

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have grasped further possibilities when the sun is given centrality in a composition. As Claude left no verbal commentary, such direct communication of visual thinking is only speculation; but once seen, Wals’s wonder-inducing, meditative simplifications of landscape are unforgettable. It is also significant that he obtained much the same effect by etching small round landscapes, one of which survives. Yet Claude was never pulled very far in the direction of these German artists’ meditative inwardness. Claude struck a naturalistic balance making his pictures more accessible than Elsheimer’s or Wals’s. While not willingly servile to society – he made no formal portraits of the rich and powerful, nor celebrated their personages in historic events – he wasn’t a Stoic ascetic either. Claude appears to have been perfectly willing to live in this world observing and celebrating its natural wonders. He is as likely to have learned as much about light while looking at the Bay of Naples as at Wals’s invented scenes. Further, Netherlandish influences ensured that Claude remained firmly ‘down-to-earth.’ Bartolomeus Breenbergh (1598/1600–1657) and Cornelis Van Poelenburgh (1594/5–1667) were both landscape painters trained in the Netherlands who found their métier in the Italian countryside around Rome. Their Arcadian pictures contain Christian-Humanist themes that appealed to Claude and were no doubt influential upon his inimitable blend of the seen and the unseen worlds. Much the same could be said for the etchings of Claude’s compatriot from the Duchy of Lorrain, Jacques Callot (1592/3–1635). Callot, who worked in Italy until returning to France in 1621, was an etcher of genius whose realism, best known for being grounded in grisly scenes from the Thirty Years War, surely had an impact upon Claude. Misattributing copies of Callot’s Miseries of War to Claude has long been a vexed critical problem. While such attribution is unlikely, there is no doubting Claude’s debt to Callot in forming the believable terrain of even his most imaginative etchings. Yet Claude had no stomach for the violent scenes that had affected their home territory, leaving Callot to pioneer the anguished realism that comes down in history through Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, and others who witnessed atrocity.

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Little has been said about Claude’s debt to ideas circulating in his era, mainly because the evidence for his having read and conversed is so scant. The “Death Inventory of Claude’s Goods” certainly mentions books, along with pictures and a harpsichord, but no titles are given, nor are the pictures inventoried. The ideas that circulated among artists and thinkers in Claude’s day were some of the most vibrant in Christian-Humanist circles in Europe. Claude lived and worked in this milieu. Rome was a gathering point for talent and genius unlike anywhere else, and we can be sure that Claude was aware of currents of thinking hitherto neglected in discussing his artistic production. It is important to recognize that there are sources for his understanding of the meaning of light that reach beyond influences from other artists. Two Renaissance thinkers in particular should be mentioned: Tomasso Campanella (1568–1639) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the latter having been the translator of the complete works of Plato (1476) and of The Enneads by Plotinus, Plato’s second century ad Alexandrian interpreter (1492). Campanella, author of Civitas solis [The City of the Sun] (1623), is bound to have read Plato before constructing his utopia along idealistic lines. Both Campanella and Ficino were enthusiastic classicists who worked to reconcile pagan thought with Christian revelation. In other words, like Claude himself, they were Christian-Humanists whose more or less successful attempts at synthesis caused controversy among their contemporaries. Both suffered misunderstanding and censure, which Claude’s mild pictorial blending of allusions to classical writers and to the Bible never roused. Indeed Campanella had joined the Dominican order but fell into conflict with his superiors in Naples, whence he went to Calabria only again to fall afoul of the Spanish authorities who, seeing him as a revolutionary, imprisoned him and otherwise restricted his freedom until 1629. He then had several years of release from custody in Rome before fleeing to France in 1634. While Campanella never challenged basic Christian doctrines, his argu-

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ment that faith originates in one’s own individual perceptions and consciousness brought lasting censure from his church. This brilliant heterodox thinker who advocated Copernican cosmology by writing a Defence of Galileo (1622) fascinated the intellectual elite in Rome. Campanella brought into view the whole heliocentric controversy but not because he was a scientist; rather he was an astrologer, animist, and Neo-Platonist who insisted upon the primacy of light in the universe. Claude’s friend and neighbour, the painter Nicolas Poussin, was a follower of Campanella. According to Anthony Blunt, Poussin was a Stoic who believed in the beauty, harmony, and order of nature, a belief reinforced by the “pantheism, or to be more precise panpsychism, which was expounded in the early seventeenth century by Tomasso Campanella.”11 Poussin was well acquainted with Campanella during the latter’s brief freedom in Rome, no doubt bringing him into the circle to which Claude also belonged. While Blunt admits that such paintings by Poussin as The Birth of Bacchus (1657) came many years afterward, Campanella’s idea of “the spiritus or soul of the world” is essential to explaining them.12 Since for Campanella the sun is “the source of all good, in that it is the source of generation and of preservation,” it is easy to see how Poussin incorporated this idea into paintings that oppose Apollo, the celestial fertilizing force, to cold earthly matter.13 Generation and re-generation are thus central organizing themes in certain of Poussin’s most celebrated masterpieces. This helpful insight might be extended to Claude, especially as Campanella’s comparatively secure years in Rome had been thanks to the protection of Cardinal Francisco Barbarini. Claude had also enjoyed Barbarini family patronage, and several of his paintings of coastal and other scenes come down through their collection. Claude’s direct knowledge of Campanella’s Galilean heliocentrism and the pagan doctrine of spiritus mundi are a virtual certainty, but it is unlikely that the importance he attached to sunlight stopped here. Behind Campanella, and associated thinkers and artists whose work is tinged with NeoPlatonism, is the dedicated work of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) who, with the patronage

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of Cosimo de Medici, established a Platonic Academy in Florence where the works of Plato and Plotinus were translated and disseminated. Ficino’s own writings took up the challenge set by St Augustine to reconcile Platonic cosmology with Christian theology. Without quite abandoning the medieval Christian world-view, Ficino centred questions about life’s meaning and purpose on human love and relations in the natural world. His adaptations of Plato and Plotinus became the worldly Humanism in which Renaissance art flourished. Thus Ficino’s influence was pervasive, lasting well into the era of Poussin and Claude, whose overall programs in art it helped to define. It is inconceivable that either could have painted as they did without at least the aura of Ficino around them. Of course, Poussin was more an intellectual than Claude; he thought more about managing both heroic classical form and literary content, remaining closer in his pictures to Greek and Roman sources than did Claude. The problem in sorting out what were the deciding influences on Claude’s work is that he assimilated so much more into a personal synthesis than did Poussin that it seems diminishing to try to extract the elements, whether Virgilian, Ovidian, Neo-Platonist, or some other. It is, however, justified to speak of an exact source in the matter of light, or rather of how confidence was gained to turn light into the controlling subject of his art. Claude’s enjoyment of the patronage of Cardinal Carlo Camillo Massimi (1620–1676) had a lot to do with strengthening confidence in themes he intuitively knew to be his own. As Anthony Blunt comments regarding Claude’s development of the pastoral theme, rather than being a Virgilian scholar himself, “he is more likely to have absorbed the atmosphere of the pastorals through Italian translations and through the conversation of his more learned friends, such as Cardinal Massimi.”14 Massimi’s uneasy tenure in the church had much to do with his committed classicism and antiquarian pursuits, which included holding private seminars with knowledgeable artists and scholars. He was himself a draughtsman, friend of Poussin, and also of Claude whose choice of subjects he deftly guided through several commissions. None of these commissions were for Christian subjects, all being Ovidian, Virgilian, and other classically derived subject matter. It is hardly possible that, when commissions were discussed with

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Massimi, the matter of Claude’s enthusiasm for illumination did not come up, with inevitable references to Ficino’s doctrine of the sun’s rays infusing life into all earthly matter. Take just two examples: View of Crescenza (1649) (Liber Veritatis 118) and Coast Scene with Perseus (The Origin of Coral) (1674) (Liber Veritatis 184). The first is an outstanding example of a landscape with mysterious “inner glow,” seen both in the masterful small painting (Metropolitan Museum) and in Earlom’s more linear engraved interpretation. Light fills the space selectively picking out near and far objects such that the tranquil herdsman is privileged over the distant castle. He is the contemplative beatus vir so frequently encountered in Claude’s art. The second gives the radiant sun centrality in relation to the huge arched rock’s framing gap, while an Ovidian drama is played out in miniature below. The moon, rather than the sun, has been suggested but this is unlikely as in 1674 the original owner, Cardinal Massimi, described his painting as a sunrise. Claude seems to ask: which is the leading subject, the sun or the scene around Pegasus, and how do they relate? The sun’s energy is clearly the primary source of all else that transpires in this beguiling mythic concoction. Whereas Ficino developed no theory of beauty, thinking perhaps that Plotinus had already definitively done so in the First Ennead, he did set down in De Sole [The Book of the Sun] (1494) the main constituents of an aesthetic of light: “Nothing recalls the nature of goodness more than light. Firstly, light appears very pure and exalted in the realm of the senses. Secondly, of all things it is most easily and widely radiated in an instant. Thirdly, it harmlessly encounters everything and penetrates it very gently and pleasantly. Fourthly, it carries with itself a nourishing warmth, that cherishes all things, bestowing life and movement. Fifthly, while it is present and within everything, it is spoiled by nothing and mixed with nothing. Likewise goodness itself stands above the whole order of things, is spread very widely, and caresses and attracts everything.”15 This text exactly describes Claude’s associating light with earthly goodness, illumination being the primary source of healthy life on earth. Undoubtedly he would have subscribed to Ficino’s further statement: “Our divine Plato named the Sun the visible son

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of Goodness itself. He also thought that the Sun was the manifest symbol of God, placed by God himself in this worldly temple so that everyone everywhere could admire it above all else. Plato and Plotinus said that the ancients venerated this Sun as God.”16 Ficino continues by advocating observation of the rising sun to remind us how seemingly dead things can return to life, an almost religious regenerative ritual observation such as that practiced by Claude during his excursions into the countryside. Did Cardinal Massimi present Claude with this text? He could have done so in good conscience since Ficino was careful to add that, while Apollo “pierces the dense body of the Python with the stings of his rays, purges it, dissolves it and raises it up,” so will Christ be resurrected: an afterthought perhaps but enough to legitimize this pagan text in Christian Rome.17 Did Claude also have access to Ficino’s Latin translation of Plotinus’s Enneads, especially the First Ennead, Sixth Tractate on Beauty? It is impossible to say, but there are some surprising parallels. This treatise is actually a redaction prepared by Plotinus’s follower Porphyry about ad 304, well after the founding of Plotinus’s academy in Rome in the year 244. Plotinus’s highly influential mystical teachings about the world as emanation of the unseen One necessitated texts that could be studied. These circulated in Rome from that time on, always challenged by Christian revelation but never succumbing to it. After Plotinus, a Platonist who disbelieved Christianity, his followers tried to adapt his thought to make it acceptable to Christian authorities, an exercise that kept Neo-Platonism alive as late as the eighteenth century and as far away as England. Plotinus was a mystic, whose philosophical system is based on individual experience of the absolute, emphasizing the moral discipline needed to make possible the highest awareness. Perception of beauty is a central test of the soul’s endeavor to forsake matter for spirit, to purify itself. Plotinus put this in personal terms: “many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and selfencentred; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine,”

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before an inevitable descent back into the body.18 Thus the apprehension of beauty was a function of contemplative self-discipline, ridding consciousness of earthly desire. The results are spelled out in the Sixth Tractate on Beauty: “We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion with Ideal-Form,” that it possesses pattern, symmetry and colour in accordance with the Divine-Thought.19 Following Plato, the perfection of any composition pre-exists the work of art in an unseen ideal form that the artist approximates only to the degree that he is spiritually prepared. This profoundly nonmodern view, the opposite of zest for being “original” and transgressive, was undoubtedly appealing to Claude – whether he read it in texts or only heard it filtered through discussions. Light is primary in Plotinus’s treatise on beauty, and its source is the sun: “to any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the Soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.”20 These are stirring words. They give the central compelling text for Claude’s entire endeavour in art, including most of the etchings. It is no exaggeration to say that to paint or etch light, one had to become one with the light, as Claude seems to have attempted to do during his outings to observe daybreaks and sunsets. This is probably as far as he went with practicing ritual “mysteries” enjoined by Plotinus upon those who wished to transcend mere earthly copies for the “Source of Life.” According to Plotinus, contemplation awakens the inner vision where the truest objects are found, beyond those outwardly encountered on life’s journey. This is the true quest to which one must awaken: “the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love, a trembling that is all delight” to “move in the realm of Truth, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.”21 Could this be the meaning of Claude’s early etching L’Apparition [The Vision] (circa 1630) [1 and 2], which exists in five states but with no corresponding drawing or painting? The winged (probably female) messenger, lying on a rock above him, surprises a kneeling male figure who hears her say something startlingly

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unexpected. A revelation occurs, pictorially reinforced by a spring-fed rivulet beside him, which pours into the body of water below. This is a moment of discovery, perhaps a vision of the unseen order Plotinus describes as a gift after long discipline. The angel’s wing, aligning with the man’s head, is like a beam of light upon him; in the far distance appears a towered city, man’s creation, positioned so as to seem irrelevant to the drama being enacted. A tall straight tree just to the right of the figures, by the rivulet, contrasts with a young tree winding into a bent tree on the other side, as if to warn against captivity to old dogma when newer, purer enlightenment is at hand. In other words, the distant church gives no help, while removing into the wilderness induces the male figure to “declare himself ” in a moment of insight. Added to the guesswork surrounding this enigmatic etching should be the possibility that it depicts a Neo-Platonic initiation rite. Plotinus’s teachings could be the ultimate written source, though it was Ficino who made most of winged couriers bearing messages from the One to unenlightened humankind. The winged soul, traced to Plato’s Phaedrus, communicates love into the yearning minds of men, then into their bodies, allowing perception of Beauty. The incorporeal thus takes material form, and only then is the artist empowered to see the world as it really is. Neo-Platonists recognized that the artist’s calling had much more to it than mastery of landscape technique assisted by learning from the work of other artists. Claude’s qualitative difference from his mentors in using light may be explained in this way. The kneeling figure may well have been Claude himself, in a moment of self-recognition. Once stated, the motif did not need repeating, though there may be reminiscences in various drawings of Moses and the Burning Bush. He frequently depicted the artist drawing, so why not dare to show just once how the artist was first instructed to draw “like an angel”? Reticence was a governing rule among Neo-Platonist initiates, contemplative silence being their habit unless to other initiates, so we may never have confirmation of what The Apparition (earlier called The Vision) is really about. The problem of “ideas” in Claude’s art has never been faced, largely because the drawings, paintings, and etchings are so fully realized and authoritative. What does it matter

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where the inspiration came from? To make a comparison, Poussin is known to have been inclined to Stoicism, which taught that the individual life is good when in harmony with nature. Yet for Stoics nature tended to be rigid, deterministic, and cyclical: would Poussin’s classicism have been more fluid had he not been a Stoic? Stoic ideas, derived from Zeno, Seneca, and others, cannot answer this question. Temperament and other factors are involved, which Poussin’s famed attraction to the ideas circulating in Rome fail to explain. His most memorable pictures are those in which deeply felt visual thinking predominates over the illustration of ideas. For example, Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion Collected by his Widow (1648) is a more moving painting than any of The Four Seasons (1660–64), which are dominated by allegory. Putting ideological labels on an artist’s work, or expecting them to emerge, can compromise, or even foreclose, unique visual experience. Artists eager to “explain” their work are rightly suspected of not having fully realized its visual potential for communication on its own terms. Yet knowing something of artists’ personal, social, and ideological contexts contributes richly to what it is possible to see in their art. The task here is to access unfamiliar states of mind, which allow vital contact with etchings, along with Claude’s other works, belonging to a past with which we have nearly lost connection. It is important to know why Claude, who so revered antiquity along with nature, absorbed Virgil and Ovid, whose ideas more often than not are unobtrusively folded into his landscape compositions. While program notes to pictures are not essential, they indeed can help, as scholars have shown. But a much wider sweep of ideas circulating in Claude’s Rome is still needed. As noted, Claude and Poussin lived in the most vital of European cultural centres in an era when a rich accumulation of Renaissance art, poetry, music, and attendant theorizing was available, indeed could not be avoided. We have only begun to appreciate this unique seventeenthcentury circumstance, and much more investigation is needed. For example, the art historian Humphry Wine, noting “a relationship between light and the divine,” suggests that Claude might have known the poet Saint-Amant (1594–1661), Bishop Antoine Godeau (1605–1672), and the Jesuit Jean de Bussieres (1607–1678) since all wrote in commendation

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of the sun as a spiritual source.22 Claude may have been enough in touch with his French culture of origin to have some knowledge of writers who supported teachings by Campanella and Ficino. A new historical synthesis is needed to appreciate how it came about that Claude’s personal susceptibility to the spiritual meaning of light was so well served by the thinkers and writers of his time. A further line of enquiry linked to the historical is the archetypal. Archetypes are more or less active in Claude’s pictures, arising spontaneously, not because the artist put them there. If conscious intentionality is only a small part of how ideas vitalize pictures, the appearance of archetypes is even less so. Archetypes are the timeless primal motifs of the collective unconscious, and they are embodied cross-culturally according to time and place. “Collective unconscious” is indeed a controversial concept needing justification, and it may be enough to say that every society has its basic symbolic units of linguistic and visual meaning with which human experience resonates. Thus life and death, light and dark, time and eternity have basic imageries surrounding them that recur in various guises. An artist may or may not succeed in evoking these deepest of all imageries: Claude was masterful in doing so, as the etchings fully demonstrate. Conscious intent can have had little to do with the remarkable density of Claude’s archetypalism. Careful analysis of virtually any of his pictures will reveal imageries resonating with primal or archetypal human concerns, a task that has yet to be performed. A good starting point would be Mircea Eliade’s chapter “Experiments of the Mystic Light” in The Two and the One (1962). n e o - p l at o n i s m i n e n g l a n d Neo-Platonism was eagerly received among writers in Renaissance England and its flourishing prepared the way for Claude’s art in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and his poetry owe much to Neo-Platonism, while Edmund Spenser’s verse is saturated with it, especially The Fowre Hymnes (1596). The

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essence of teachings about love and beauty by Plato, Plotinus, and Ficino can be extracted from these delicate poems. Like his exemplars, Spenser urged moral improvement as the necessary concomitant of realizing beauty in art. The Cambridge Platonists, several Anglican divines teaching in Cambridge colleges, taught Neo-Platonism as a way of combating philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) materialism in the seventeenth century. Their treatises blended Platonism with Christianity to form a “reasonable” religion, while Henry More’s long poem Psychozoia Platonica (1642) envisaged the soul’s journey to enlightenment. In the early eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury took up the Platonic cause in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), which was the first attempt by an Englishman to articulate an aesthetic theory. Shaftesbury contributed greatly to the formation of the English taste for the picturesque, and he owned at least one painting by Claude Lorrain. Though a churchman, he was skeptical of orthodox Anglican belief and practice, preferring the Neo-Platonic and latitudinarian thought of Cambridge Platonism. His plea was to recognize in people their “goodness of heart,” innate benevolence, and openness to Nature as a refining influence. To this end, in “A Rhapsody,” he set up a dialogue between Theocles, an enthusiastic advocate of nature’s wonders and his interlocutor Philocles. The latter, in search of the “highest good” through nature’s beauty, attends to a didactic discourse that alters awareness by appealing to both emotion and reason. Skepticism is assailed by a flourish of emotion. Rapturous Horatian praise of nature breaks into this rational discourse: “Ye Fields and Woods, my Refuge from the toilsom World of Business, receive me in your quiet Sanctuaries, and favour my Retreat and thoughtful Solitude.” The effusion continues: “O Glorious Nature! Supremely Fair, and sovereignly Good! All-loving and All lovely, All-divine.”23 Praise of the sun is what makes Shaftesbury’s writing an exact intellectual context for the reception of Claude’s aesthetic in England. Theocles praises the sun: “Prodigious Orb! Bright Source of vital Heat, and Spring of Day! Soft Flame, yet how intense, how active! How diffusive, and how vast a Substance; yet how collected thus within it-self, and in a

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glowing Mass confin’d to the Center of this Planetary World!” The finale is a rhapsodic affirmation of Plotinus’s and Ficino’s doctrine of the sun as God: “Yet how immense a Body it seems, compar’d with ours of human Form, a borrow’d Remnant of its variable and oft-converted Surface? tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit, by which we have Relation and Tendency to Thee our Heavenly Sire, Center of Souls; to whom these Spirits of ours by Nature tend, as earthly Bodys to their proper Center.”24 Shaftesbury constructs a persuasive fiction, in the manner of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, as a way of introducing a more systematic philosophical treatise on beauty as the function of Forms (part 3, section 2, 404f). As with Walton, his literary tactic is to induce, through dialogue, a mood that is not so much one of pastoral tranquility, but one of active participation in natural wonders. He wants his readers (especially those too deferential to “reason”) to know that only by intense engagement with light suffusing nature is the clearest seeing made possible. Only then do rational definitions of beauty become relevant. Having surveyed nature, the moment of enlightenment arrives: “Tis true, said I (Theocles!), I own it. Your Genius, the Genius of the Place, and the Great Genius have at last prevail’d. I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind; where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoil’d their genuine Order by breaking in upon the primitive state. Even the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s and broken Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself, as representing Nature more, will be more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.”25 Consulting the “genius of the place” became the eighteenth-century landscape gardener’s guiding precept; here it means the divine “idea” pervading nature waiting to be grasped only when, at last, the soul is prepared. Shaftesbury therefore evokes nature as a “primitive state” infused with the Idea emanating from the Platonic One, an ideal fully and consistently matched by Claude’s pictorial formulations in drawings, etchings, and paintings. Guided by Platonic precepts, Claude appears to have deftly blended naturalistic observa-

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tion with imaginative vision. It is this that gave his art distinction and recommended it to the sophisticated English who understood their Christian-Humanist heritage. Men and women of taste and learning, delighting in Shaftesbury, certainly knew what to look for in art: Salvator Rosa, Poussin, and Gaspard Dughet but, above all, Claude met the criteria for the most affecting vision of nature. By viewing nature aided by Claude, vision would be clarified and melancholic moods lifted. Assisted by Shaftesbury’s uplifting words and, taken as a series, the etchings could have a therapeutic effect. 109

c l au d e’s l i g h t i n e n g l a n d Claude’s discovery of new subtleties in how the sun diffuses light on land and sea would, by itself, have been sufficient recommendation to English artists. As early as 1718, the astute Englishman Sir William Freeman called Claude Lorrain “one of the finest landscape painters that ever lived, and remarkable for his happy imitation of sunshine.”26 Lightstarved English collectors naturally seized upon his renderings of light-infused atmosphere, shadow, and cloud formation as the characteristic dramatic occurrences in the everchanging sky over England; the sun’s appearance and disappearance is an inescapable topic of conversation. Claude’s mysteriously lit nostalgic classicism, which was celebrated in architectural fantasies of a lost age of greatness, touched educated connoisseurs, many of whom had been on the Grand Tour to sunny Italy. Mood shifts from il penseroso to l’allegro and back again were culturally specific. In the first English Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, published by John Smith in 1837, it is not surprising to find admiringly described as many as 423 paintings by Claude Lorrain, a large proportion of them in English private collections. Smith also described the Liber Veritatis and its thirty-eight etchings as important adjuncts to the paintings. For the landscape artist of closest affinity, Nicolas Poussin, only 342 paintings are listed, many of them also in England. As Poussin made no etchings, other engravers

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stood in to satisfy the demand, but there were not so many as reproduced images by Claude. Surprisingly, Smith did not bracket Salvator Rosa with these leading landscapists, though his paintings and etchings also won approval as typifying “the sublime.” The most important indication, however, of Claude’s impact on English culture is that upon working artists themselves. As Kenneth Clark puts it, Claude “gave to English painting a simpler scaffolding [than Poussin] on which the native school could build. There was something in Claude’s gentle poetry, in his wistful glances at a vanished civilization and in his feeling that all nature could be laid out for man’s delight, like a gentleman’s park, which appealed particularly to the English connoisseurs of the eighteenth century.”27 A roll call of leading names influenced by Claude should be no surprise in itself, but it may be so to recognize that these very artists were the ones to gain the most international fame. It is not too much to claim that Claude energized the greatest era of English landscape art from the mid-eighteenth century to the Romantic era and on into the nineteenth century. Claude’s presence was so commanding that artists had to position themselves regarding his work, especially its use of light in landscape. All had to decide about the Claudian aesthetic: some artists had large instant gains, others hesitated thoughtfully, while still others ultimately reacted against Claude. Numerous minor English copyists of Claude, such as John Wootton, George Lambert, and the Smiths of Chichester, along with other painters and engravers, did much to disseminate his aesthetic.28 The first distinctive painter to emulate Claude was Richard Wilson (1713/14–1782), a founder of the Royal Academy. When Wilson moved from Wales to London in 1729 he was undoubtedly gripped by Claude’s paintings, and his sojourn in Italy from 1750–56 confirmed him as a painter of ideal landscapes. Having learned scenic design from Claude, Wilson transformed English landscape’s customary topographical renderings into a vehicle for the artist’s sensitive reactions to nature. While lacking the deep resonances of Claude’s landscapes, Wilson’s paintings make a fair try at seeing the English countryside in like manner, and his work as a professional fixed Claude in the English artistic mentality.

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Another very influential figure was Sir Joseph Beaumont (1753–1827), amateur landscape painter and art patron, who became a founder of the National Gallery and a trustee of the British Museum. Beaumont and his wife Rachel were closely identified with the rise of Romanticism through association with Wordsworth and Coleridge, Beaumont’s passion for Claude being a principal motivation. His unwavering commitment to Claude resembles that of the more scholarly Richard Payne Knight, also a Trustee of the British Museum and generous donor of its outstanding collection of drawings by Claude. It is legend that when Beaumont gave his Claude paintings to the new National Gallery, the donation included his most cherished Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646), which he could not bear to live without, so he asked for its return and the request was honoured. Beaumont also debated William Gilpin and was a friend of Uvedale Price, thus helping the spread of picturesque landscaping theory and practice. As a painter, Beaumont was diligent and sensitive. He valued feeling over literal naturalism in painting landscape and always looked for the “play of light”; some resulting pictures are surprisingly fine. It is little wonder that the young John Constable (1776–1837) should have come under the influence of Beaumont. As Beaumont’s mother lived at Dedham, near Constable’s home in the Stour Valley, a contact was made which led to the young artist being shown Sir George’s prized Claude of Hagar and the Angel. Thereafter Constable’s enthusiasm for Claude was boundless and, judging by his biographer C.R. Leslie, he accepted this lightdrenched picture as a standard to emulate. Later Constable set about copying in full scale a “marine picture” by Claude in the Angerstein collection in London: “The very doing it will almost bring me into communion with Claude,” he is reported to have said.29 Undoubtedly, Claude’s effects of light and shade seized Constable’s imagination, leading him to fresh observation of clouds and sky, especially in the miraculous Hampstead pictures. He was enabled to bring heightened perception to everyday sights, thereby opening a new era in English naturalism. It is insufficient to say that Constable had studied Luke Howard’s scientific classification of clouds, when it was how clouds held light that really engaged him as an artist.30 Constable’s discourses show conclusively that Claude’s use of

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light influenced how Constable went about his art. He writes: “Claude’s exquisite works … are wholly without rivalry in the quality which distinguishes them of placid brightness.” Constable continues with praise of “his sea-views, his golden sunsets, his wild and romantic shores, and his exquisitely poetic pastoral scenes” as “luminous beauties”; “his chief power consisted in uniting splendour with repose, warmth with freshness, and dark with light.” The praise is unstinting: “In Claude’s landscape all is lovely – all amiable – all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart. He carried landscape, indeed, to perfection, that is, human perfection … Brightness was the characteristic excellence of Claude; brightness, independent of colour, for what colour is there?”31 Such praise of light could occur only in England where the poet Thomas Gray had spoken of Claude’s “beams of sunshine, the rising moon etc” and the aesthete Horace Walpole spoke of his “tranquil sunshine.” Even William Gilpin, the touchy theorist of picturesque beauty, granted Claude “colour and light.” In a debate written by Uvedale Price for the benefit of Richard Payne Knight, Price introduces a Mr Seymour. Having left the countryside for a gallery to look at pictures, Mr Seymour comments of a Claude: “I have great pleasure in seeing the same soft lights, the same general glow which we admired in the real landscape represented with such skill, that, now the true splendour of the sun is no longer before us, the picture seems nature itself.” He adds tellingly: “What a picture would this be to have in one’s sitting room! to have always before one such an image of fine weather, such a happy mixture of warmth and freshness!”32 Here is the rationale for large light-filled engravings, such as those of Francis Vivares, which graced many eighteenth-century drawing rooms. Small prints would not do in grand settings, unless sometimes mounted on screens. All the same, English artists took the example of Claude’s gallery of miniature etchings on themes readily associated with the large paintings, which could often be seen on private and public display in London. As noted, by 1816 Claude’s etchings, epitomizing his art, were in such demand that they were re-issued through the book and print trade. Similarly, it is not too much to claim that Constable’s collaboration with David Lucas on mezzotints

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after his own paintings owes something to a standard set by Claude the etcher. Lucas’s most brilliant work, published in 1833 as Various Subjects of Landscape, and in a New Series in 1846, may have been a commercial failure but the discerning public recognized the combined genius of painter and printmaker. Today these mezzotints are highly valued as exploring Constable’s best insights into the uses of light in his new ventures in landscape. J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) took Claude’s uses of light far beyond anything envisaged by the master or any of his English followers. With a more aggressive temperament than the melancholic Constable, the prodigy Turner quickly asserted his formidable powers. Claude’s presence as an artist of light both enabled and inhibited Turner’s urgent need to restate English landscape. Travel to Italy enlarged his range of picturesque subject matter over that of the stay-at-home Constable, enabling him to develop the greater expressive means. Turner chafed against Claude’s reassuring, peaceable vision of nature. At age twenty-four, Turner had seen one of the Altieri Claudes that had been brought to London, and he recounted to the diarist Farington how the picture had struck him: “He was both pleased and unhappy while he viewed it, it seemed to be beyond the power of imitation.”33 Thus Turner was caught in a bind between powerful influence and resistance to it; rivalry with Claude lasted his entire career. What came as a gift to Constable was a kind of curse to Turner as he strove to reconcile his pessimistic vision of nature with Claude’s seeming mastery of light. While always respecting Claude’s use of light as “pure as Italian air, calm, beautiful and serene,” he transformed it into enveloping, tempestuous atmospheric effects, far from the classical tradition.34 As Kenneth Clark explained Turner’s attitude, “it was open rivalry, in contrast to Constable’s quiet assimilation.”35 Turner spent a long time constructing “sham Claudes” before transforming the objects of nature into a maelstrom of exciting but disturbing expressive statements. It is these propulsive dark forces by which Turner is best known today: for example, Rough Sea with Wreckage (circa 1830), Tate Gallery; The Evening of the Deluge (1843), Tate Gallery; and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), National Gallery, London. In these pictures, light is inseparable from dark destructive forces.

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These are works of transition from the age of the Claudian idyll, Wordsworthian nature worship, and the picturesque landscape aesthetic to one of mechanism, speed, and disruption of the natural order. Turner’s sensibility exactly tracked the course of industrial and social events in England that ended the hegemony of Claude. John Ruskin, Turner’s champion, assisted in the demise. Both were themselves tempestuous enough personalities to exemplify the break up of the peaceable kingdom of which Claude had been the adopted prophet. In Turner’s hands the regenerative light of Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and of Shaftesbury, turned into a capricious force of unknown origin. Nature was redefined with a rawness and indeterminacy it has never quite lost, no longer the friend of humankind but our containment all the same. The cataclysmic extreme may have been in the graphic work of John Martin, but it is Turner who most exactly tracks the course away from Claude towards reprocessing nature according to one’s inner demons. All the same, Turner honoured Claude by emulation in his Liber Studiorum, which shows the range of his own work in the manner of Claude’s Liber Veritatis. Between 1807 and 1819, Turner issued seventy-one of the projected 100 plates, and many steel engravings by other artists were published in testimony of Turner’s lengthy tussle with Claude’s understanding of light upon landscape. Before Claude’s light dimmed out of English painting it had a brief, brilliant effulgence in the work of William Blake’s younger disciples, especially Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) and Edward Calvert (1799–1883). In reminiscence by Palmer, Blake is reported to have remarked on how the painter Claude achieved the effects of light. Having examined many “spurious” Claudes, Blake commented, regarding the real ones, that “there were, upon the focal lights of the foliage, small specks of pure white which made them appear to be glittering with dew which the morning sun had not yet dried up … His description of these genuine Claudes, I shall never forget. He warmed to his subject, and it continued through an evening walk. The sun was set; but Blake’s Claudes made sunshine in that shady place.”36 It is also certain that Blake looked with care at Claude’s etchings, as he did at

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those of Albrecht Dürer and other leading practitioners of the art. He is bound to have known of the early nineteenth-century flourish of interest in Claude’s original plates. G. Schultz successfully reprinted Claude’s etchings in 1816 from his shop on Poland Street, near the house where Blake had lived from 1785 to 1790 and with whose inhabitants he must have remained familiar, even after moving to Lambeth. It would be nice to think that Blake’s astonishing outbreak of light in Glad Day was a tribute to Claude, but Blake’s sources are far too complicated to allow such a supposition. His words to Palmer praising Claude, however, had a lasting effect, first on his Shoreham “visionary” pictures and later, less fortunately, on landscapes made in Italy. The critic Geoffrey Grigson thought that Palmer’s two prime influences were John Milton’s pastoral poems and Claude’s landscapes, in that both showed “the spiritual imaged by the visible.” Grigson notes that, in addition to pictures by Blake, Palmer possessed “engravings by Bonasone, pictures by Claude, or Michelangelo, or Fuseli,” but he does not call those by Claude “etchings.”37 However, from a letter of 1876 to Mr T.O. Barlow it is clear that Palmer had carefully examined Claude’s etchings for how they produced light. In criticizing a technical term in etching, “retroussage” (a means in printing plates of bringing up images into greater richness of texture), Palmer commented: “Well retroussage, if not kept within narrow bounds, extinguishes those thousand little luminous eyes which peer through a finished linear etching, and in those of Claude are moving sunshine upon dew, or dew upon violets in the shade.”38 That Palmer had thought carefully about preserving the paper’s luminosity is evident from etchings such as The Herdsman’s Cottage, or Sunset (1850) and The Early Ploughman, or The Morning Spread upon the Mountains (begun before 1861), which depend upon skillful management of sunlight. Amongst Palmer’s “visionary” drawings, which became paintings, none speaks so eloquently of Claudian influence as The Bright Cloud (circa 1831–32), an adaptation of the shepherd and shepherdess living in a Golden Age so familiar from Claude’s etchings. This motif from the Campagna has become thoroughly domesticated in Kent. Only in Palmer’s later years, when the

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intensity of vision had diminished and he was looking for inspiration in Italy, did Claude’s influence weigh him down. Upon return to England, and his resumption of etching in the 1880s, Palmer recovered the early visual power that owed so much to Blake having called his attention to Claudian light, the source of imagination. Much the same can be said for Edward Calvert (1799–1883) whose inspiration paralleled Palmer’s but whose productive years were much briefer. A member of Palmer’s circle, “The Ancients” in London and Shoreham, Kent, Calvert had also been fired by seeing Blake’s astonishing series of small illustrative wood engravings for Thornton’s school edition of Virgil. Calvert commented: “They are done as if by a child; several of them careless and incorrect, yet there is a spirit in them, humble enough and of force enough to move simple souls to tears.”39 Blake’s visionary pastorals had induced similar efforts in his young disciples, and Calvert’s miniature engravings have a distinction all their own. More erotic than any by Palmer, they also more obviously capture sunlight as an engendering force. Calvert was a committed Claudian who praised the simple life and celebrated arcadia in a thoroughly English idiom. As with Palmer’s sepia The Valley Thick with Corn (1825), Calvert’s wood engraving The Cyder Feast (1828) has a huge disc-like sun in its distant background, a more literal statement than Claude would have made but certainly in keeping with his discovery of light. Into the twentieth century, English etchers attempted to extend the marvels they so rightly saw in the diminutive works of Blake, Palmer, and Calvert. While reproductive print technology was making etching and engraving on wood less essential, a few artists kept the skills of their masters alive. Such prints as Graham Sutherland’s Pecken Wood (1925), Paul Drury’s September (1928), and F.L. Griggs’s Owlpen Manor (1930) maintained something of the Shoreham spirit. More recently still, Robin Tanner (1904–1988) celebrated an English rural idyll even as he lamented the passing of traditional England. His remarkable pantheistic naturalism, as in The Old Thorn, appears to be the last concerted effort at preserving the Claudian idiom in England. In his autobiography, published in

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1987, Tanner wrote: “Maybe it was presumptuous to suppose that out of a simple oak stile and the fields beyond I could convey something timeless and universal rather than something merely pleasant and fugitive. Yet that was what held me captive and goaded me on.”40 It took Tanner tremendous effort not to capitulate to the cynicism and despair that was overtaking the graphic and other arts of his time. A great divide was opening in art between a deeply felt attachment to nature and a perception of the empty trivialities in a society driven by urban expansion and commercialism. Overwhelmed by multitudes of electronically-generated imagery, ever-present media communications, and advertising, the modest, but quietly insistent, English Claudians seem to have expired. Their work is now known mainly to museum curators and collectors whose taste was formed by academic study rather than by attending to the cultural norms of society. As the poet W.B. Yeats so presciently saw: “Gyres run on / When that greater dream had gone / Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude, / Prepared a rest for the people of God, / Palmer’s phrase, but after that / Confusion fell upon our thought.”41 Yeats’s “greater dream” no doubt refers to the entire Christian-Humanist heritage of western civilization. It can also be taken to refer to the heightened imagination brought vibrantly alive by English poetry and art, which Yeats strove to extend. We have shown that Claude’s arrival in England was crucially important in heightening the eighteenth-century English awakening to the visual effects of landscape. Supporting that advent were the critical writings of Joseph Addison, which no account of this phase of cultural history should neglect. Addison supplied a remarkable theory of creative imagination that exactly correlates with Claude’s achievement and helps to explain its English apotheosis. In a series of eight brief essays for The Spectator in June 1712 (411–18), Addison explored the question of how visual experience produces “Pleasures of the Imagination,” the title by which these writings are known. Addison’s periodical writings remain fresh and engaging because they are tentative and unfinished as to theory. They hadn’t hardened into philosophical certainties as was to

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happen in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into The Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759), nor tend towards the contentious as in William Gilpin’s Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (1792) and Sir Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque (1794). Addison simply sketched ideas as they came to him, priming a latent consciousness that was to give England an era of cultural riches. Addison opens with: “Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments … [Sight] is this sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the pleasures of the imagination, or fancy … I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.”42 He continues: “We have the power of retaining, altering and compounding those images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination; for by this faculty a man in a dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with scenes and landscapes more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole compass of nature.43 This is nothing less than a manifesto empowering the imagination to a new level of function as it works associatively from natural objects. Though not named in these essays, its finest exemplar was Claude Lorrain. Addison’s “man in a dungeon,” using imagination to sustain himself, was perhaps under worse affliction than that of the damp, dark English climate. He could well have been a prototypical victim of the “English malady,” or melancholia, which required much more for alleviation than a change in the weather. As Addison says: “The English are naturally fanciful, and very often disposed by that gloominess and melancholy of temper, which is so frequent in our nation, to many wild notions and visions, to which others are not so liable.”44 His purpose in these essays was to examine the best ways of replacing “wild notions and visions”

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with health-giving imaginative associations from natural objects. Thus, Addison writes: “A beautiful prospect delights the soul” and says of “a man of polite imagination”: “He meets with a secret refreshment in a description and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows, than another does in the possession”; the person of cultivated imagination “looks upon the world, as it were in another light, and discovers in it a multitude of charms, that conceal themselves to the generality of mankind.”45 In other words, Addison prescribes a regimen of acquiring good objects in memory and, by imaginative manipulation, converting them into mood-changing aesthetic experiences. “Conversing” with pictures and sculptures induces heightened awareness. This elevation of mood was a harmless, natural way for the mind to rid itself of depressing thoughts, a method unfortunately abandoned in the substance abuse that was to drag down the lives of later Romantics such as De Quincey and Coleridge. It is, however, still seen at work in Wordsworth’s poetry and gratified countless picturesque travelers who, fleeing industrialism, went to the Lake Country and other remote parts of England. Throughout these essays examining and refining the uses of imagination, Addison maintained the disarming focus on “pleasures of the imagination,” which he actually intended as something much more serious than hedonism. He was re-discovering an underused natural function of the human mind – its ability to re-engage with the external world of wonders, which had been lost to fear, grief, and gloomy introspection. Addison indeed pays tribute to both Christian and Humanist literary resources for enlarging the self-restricted mind. He might have specified the work of artists whose visual discoveries had best concentrated in formal terms these enlargements. But that is left to readers, many of whom undoubtedly applied Addison’s discussion directly to the images of Claude Lorrain, images they might have held in their own hands as etchings. Addison wrote: “We nowhere meet with a more glorious or pleasing show of nature, than what appears in the heavens at the rising and setting of the sun, which is wholly made up of those different

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stains of light that show themselves in clouds of a different situation. For this reason we find the poets, who are always addressing themselves to the imagination, borrowing more of their epithets from colours than from any other topic.”46 Addison’s sophistication arose from making the connections between nature and art, and many must have taken his recommendations as pointing to Claude, an intermediary at the highest level of enhanced imagination. 120

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chapter three

Biographical Essentials

Claude Gellée le Lorrain’s life span is usually given as 1600–1682, but his date of birth has recently been questioned, asserted to be circa 1604–5.1 He was born in the village of Chamagne, diocese of Toul, Dukedom of Lorrain, to Jean Gellée and Anne (or Idatte) Padose, who were modestly prosperous citizens. The third of five sons, Claude’s older brothers helped him after he was orphaned at about age twelve. His eldest brother Jean, a maker of wood intarsia, took him as assistant to Freiburg-in-Breisgau. In 1613 another relation took Claude to Rome where he became assistant to a pastry cook before going to work for the painter Agostino Tassi. About 1620 Claude moved to Naples where he studied with the German-born landscapist Gottfried Wals. He returned to Lorrain in 1625 to work in fresco at a church in Nancy with the court painter Claude Deruet, but in 1627 he again left for Rome. Establishing himself among artists in a house in Via Margutta, where apart from a move in 1650 to another house on Via Paolina, Claude’s settled habits remained unchanged. At first the household was comprised of Dutch and Flemish artists as lodgers, later came a garzone (a young male servant), and then Claude’s natural daughter Agnese (born 1653 in all probability to Claude’s maid also called Agnese). After 1660 and the departure of another maid, a nephew Giovanni Gellée arrived, and from 1679 another nephew Giuseppe Gellée took up residence. Claude was seriously ill in 1663, suffering increasingly from gout, and died on 23 November 1682. This biography is thus readily summarized since few but the essential facts about his formative years and private life are documented. There are numerous uncertainties, as

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Claude was not forthcoming and no detailed biography was attempted in his lifetime. Nevertheless, two seventeenth-century statements by admirers serve as biographical resources, the second being the more reliable: Joachim Von Sandrart (Frankfurt 1606–1688 Nuremberg) published his brief recollection in Nuremberg in 1675, while a fuller “Life of Claude” by Filippo Baldinucci (circa 1624–1696) was published in Florence in 1728. Sandrart had the advantage of knowing Claude as a friend in his early years in Rome, when he shared sketching excursions into the Campagna. He is, however, suspected of overstating his actual influence upon Claude’s habit of drawing and painting finished compositions out-of-doors. Claude was an acute observer who, Sandrart recalled, “tried by every means to penetrate nature, lying in the fields before the break of day and until night in order to learn to represent very exactly the red morning-sky, sunrise and sunset and the evening hours.”2 He boldly claims that only after Claude saw him making finished works at the falls of Tivoli did he realize the possibility of painting directly from nature rather than taking sketches back to the studio. Sandrart thus claims exclusive influence, yet another sketching companion in the 1630s was Herman Van Swanevelt (Woerden circa 1600–1655 Paris) who also practiced direct observation and made what can be regarded as finished drawings in the field. Unfortunately, Van Swanevelt left no written claim of influence, though his best drawings, paintings, and etchings of the period in Rome not only resemble but also sometimes rival Claude’s. Sandrart praises Claude’s facility with perspective, but he was also the first to condemn his human figures and animals, opening an unfair line of criticism. While recognizing Claude’s great gifts and fame, Sandrart withheld much detailed personal information that he might have supplied. He might also usefully have commented on possible encouragement of Claude’s etching in the 1630s as he, Sandrart, had been well trained in its skills by such masters as Matthias Merian, Theordorus de Bry, and Gillis Sadeler. Claude himself refrained from comment upon debts to his teachers Tassi and Wals, or such exemplary artists as Paul Bril, Adam Elsheimer, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, and Cornelis Van Poelenburgh. He is also silent as to who his mentors in etching had been.

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Baldinucci’s biography is fuller, if less tantalizing, since he knew Claude towards the end of his career and could look back over its length. Later biographies belong to the English and French revival of interest in Claude; those of John Thomas Smith in his A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch and Flemish Painters (1837) and Mrs Mark Pattison in Claude Lorrain: Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres (1884) use Baldinucci’s version, along with Claude’s will and inventory, as their primary guides to sequencing information. Little else has been discovered and, to this day, Baldinucci remains the authority, agreeing with Sandrart in most respects. His main defect is not setting the scene for Claude’s life as Rome’s most sought-after landscape painter. He could well have told us more about associations with migrant Dutch and Flemish artists who discussed naturalistic landscape; about Claude’s known friendship with Poussin; about books he read (Claude was by no means the illiterate peasant of legend); about his access to ideas of Renaissance Humanist thinkers such as Leonardo, Pico, and Ficino; and about the struggles over mannerist and baroque styles. But Baldinucci works in a smaller ambit and must be thanked for delivering the main biographical facts in narrative order. As to Claude’s achievement and character, Sandrart and Baldinucci are to be taken at their words. Both emphasize his light-filled visual insights, his new evocative naturalism and skills in design and perspective. They agree as to Claude’s disciplined, temperate life dedicated to art rather than consorting with Rome’s grandees – an unworldliness that remained when he became rich and famous. Popes and cardinals sought him to commission paintings, not the reverse. He preferred the company of his relations at home to that of the powerful; he was peaceable and even-tempered, shunning disputes and litigations. Sandrart wrote: “In his manner of life he was no great courtier, but good-hearted and pious; he searched for no other pleasure besides his profession,” to which Baldinucci added, “he was scrupulous in his good behaviour … He was the friend of everyone, and he wished to have peace with all. And whenever anything opposed such desires, he always withdrew”3 Called a man of “innocent behavior,” unlike many artists of the time, he was not in the least lascivious in his choice of subject matter.

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Claude was certainly aware of the perils around him, as Lione Pascoli recorded: “He used to narrate with great satisfaction the misfortunes and the dangers encountered in his youth, the persecutions made against him by other artists in his mature years, the traps and ambushes prepared by the envious in order to abuse his work and to discredit him in his old years.”4 Rather than engage enemies in futile disputes, Claude spoke honestly, managed his affairs well, and enjoyed contemplative refuge in his own art and that of others. He could be tricked and cheated but not deterred from his artistic purpose, which went on enriching throughout life. Enrichment came especially through immersion in the writings of Virgil and Ovid, together with Christian-Humanist writers closer to his time. European acclaim for his paintings, drawings, and etchings supported him in the phase of declining health. Claude never married but, as noted, he is said to have had a natural daughter, Agnese, who became his principal heir. Trusted relations were remembered in the will but Agnese was to have the Liber Veritatis (his sequence of finished drawings corresponding to paintings) for her lifetime and then return it to other heirs. He evidently knew that only by preserving this extraordinary document could his lifetime achievement be fairly judged. That the Liber Veritatis survived to come to rest in England is something of a miracle. It is doubtful that it could have given greater cultural enrichment in any other country.

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chapter three

List of Works

[frontispiece] John Jackson and William Ward after Claude Lorrain, Self-Portrait, 1825 (engraving on paper, 8.3 cm x 6.4 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 1 Claude Lorrain L’Apparition [The Vision], circa 1630 (etching on laid paper, state 1b or 1c, 10.5 cm x 17.1 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 2 Claude Lorrain L’Apparition [The Vision], circa 1630 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 10.5 cm x 17.1 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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3 Claude Lorrain Le Pâtre et la bergère [The Herdsman and the Shepherdess], circa 1630 (etching on wove paper, state 2, 15.3 cm x 10.8 cm) (early nineteenth-century impression) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 126

4 Claude Lorrain Les Deux paysages [The Two Landscapes], circa 1630 (etching on wove paper, state 3, 5.2 cm x 4.8 cm, 5.4 cm x 3.8 cm) (Probably an impression from J. McCreery, 200 Etchings, London, 1816; printed trial plates) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 5 Claude Lorrain La Tempête [The Tempest], 1630 (etching on laid paper, watermark: spread eagle, state 4b, 12.7 cm x 17.5 cm) (mid-eighteenth-century impression) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 6 Claude Lorrain Les Trois chèvres [The Three Goats], 1630–32 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 19.9 cm x 13.1 cm)

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Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 7 Claude Lorrain La Fuite en Egypte [The Flight into Egypt], circa 1630–33 (etching on laid paper, state 1, 10 cm x 16.8 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 8 Claude Lorrain Les Quatre chèvres [The Four Goats], circa 1633 (etching on paper, state 4, 19.5 cm x 12.8 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 9 Claude Lorrain Étude d’une scène de brigands [Study with Brigands], circa 1633 (etching on wove paper, only state, 4 cm x 7.8 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 10 Claude Lorrain Scène de brigands [Landscape with Brigands], 1633 (etching on wove paper, state 8, 12.5 cm x 19.5 cm)

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(Published by J. McCreery, 200 Etchings, London, 1816) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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11 Claude Lorrain La Danse au bord de l’eau [The Dance on the River Bank], circa 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 6b, 12.3 cm x 19.2 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 12 Claude Lorrain L’Enlèvement d’Europa [The Rape of Europa], 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 4, 20 cm x 26.2 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 13 Claude Lorrain Le Soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun], 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 4, 12.9 cm x 19.8 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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14 Claude Lorrain Le Soleil levant [Harbour Scene with Rising Sun], 1634 (etching on wove paper, state 6, 12.9 cm x 19.8 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 15 Claude Lorrain Le Passage du gué [The Ford], 1634 (etching on laid paper, state 2a, 10.3 cm x 17 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 16 Claude Lorrain Le Troupeau a l’abreuvoir [The Herd at the Watering Place], 1635 (etching on wove or laid paper, state 2, 10.2 cm x 17 cm) (early nineteenth-century impression) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 17 Claude Lorrain La Campo Vaccino [The Roman Forum], 1636 (etching on wove paper, state 9, 19.7 cm x 26.1 cm) (Published by G. Schulze, London, 1816)

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18 Claude Lorrain Le Bouvier [The Cowherd], 1636 (etching on laid paper, state 4a, 12.5 cm x 19.3 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 19 Claude Lorrain Le Bouvier [The Cowherd], 1636 (etching on wove paper, state 5, 12.5 cm x 19.3 cm) (early nineteenth-century impression) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 20 Claude Lorrain Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance], circa 1637 (etching on laid paper, state 3, 13.2 cm x 19.2 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 21 Claude Lorrain Le Danse sous les arbres [The Country Dance], circa 1637 (etching on wove paper, state 5b, 13.7 cm x 19.7 cm)

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Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 22 Claude Lorrain La Danse villageoise [The Village Dance], circa 1637 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 19.3 cm x 25.6 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 23 Claude Lorrain Le Port de mer au fanal [Harbour Scene with a Lighthouse], circa 1638–41 (etching on wove paper, state 5, 13.6 cm x 19.8 cm) (Published by G. Schulze, London, 1816) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 24 Claude Lorrain Le Départ pour les champs [Departure for the Fields], circa 1638–41 (etching on laid paper, state 3c, 12.6 cm x 17.8 cm) Purchased with funds donated by Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, and with support from the Florence G. Partridge Fund, 2007 Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection

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25 Claude Lorrain Le Dessinateur [Coast Scene with an Artist], circa 1638–41 (etching on wove or laid paper, state 4 or 5, 12 cm x 17 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 132

26 Claude Lorrain Le Naufrage [The Shipwreck], circa 1638–41 (etching on wove paper, state 5, 12.5 cm x 17 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 27 Claude Lorrain Le Pont de bois, Rebecca et Eliezer [The Wooden Bridge, Rebecca and Eliezer], 1638–41 (etching on wove or laid paper, state 7, 12.6 cm x 19 cm) (early nineteenth-century impression) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 28 Claude Lorrain Le Port de mer à la grosse tour [Harbour with a Large Tower], circa 1641 (etching on laid paper, state 2, 12.3 cm x 19 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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29 Claude Lorrain Berger et bergère conversant [Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape], circa 1651 (etching on thick wove paper, state 7, 19.9 cm x 26.3 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 30 Claude Lorrain Le Troupeau en marche par un temps orageux [The Herd Returning in Stormy Weather], 1650–51 (etching on laid paper, watermark: fa, state 2c, 15.8 cm x 22.4 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 31 Claude Lorrain Mercure et Argus [Mercury and Argus], 1662 (etching on wove paper, state 3, 14.9 cm x 21.6 cm) (Published by G. Schulze, London, 1816) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 32 Claude Lorrain Le Temps, Apollon, et les saisons [Time, Apollo, and the Seasons], 1662 (etching on laid paper, state 5a, 19.8 cm x 25.7 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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33 Claude Lorrain Le Chevrier [The Goatherd], 1663 (etching on wove paper, state 2c, 16.8 cm x 22.2 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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34 Dominique Barrière after Claude Lorrain Coast Scene with Mercury, Herse, and Aglaurus, 1668 (after Claude’s design of 1643) (etching on wove paper, 19.9 cm x 24.9 cm) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 35 Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton after Claude Lorrain Expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, 1734 (etching and woodblock on laid paper, 14.3 cm x 21 cm) (Published by John Boydell, Cheapside, 1 January 1774) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 36 Francis Vivares after Claude Lorrain Landscape with Dancing Figures, Engraved from a Picture in the Pamphili Palace at Rome, No. 26, 1766 (etching on laid paper, 49 cm x 60.2 cm) (Published by Francis Vivares, 6 February 1816) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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37 Balthasar Anton Dunker after Claude Lorrain Landscape with Mercury and Argus, 1771 (after Claude’s design of 1660) (etching on laid paper, 15.2 cm x 19.1 cm) (Published by Joseph Maillet, 1771) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 135

38 Richard Earlom after Claude Lorrain From the original drawing in the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire, No. 11, 1774 (etching with mezzotint tone on laid paper, 20.7 cm x 25.9 cm) (Published by John Boydell, Cheapside, 1 January 1774) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 39 Josiah Boydell after Claude Lorrain Self-Portrait, 1777 (mezzotint with engraving on paper, 17.6 cm x 12.4 cm) (Published by John Boydell, Cheapside, 25 March 1777) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre 40 Samuel Middiman and John Pye II after Claude Lorrain A Landscape, 1810 (etching on laid paper, 21.2 cm x 29.8 cm) (Published by William Miller) Gift of Andrew and Helen Brink in memory of R. Alexander Brink and Edith Margaret Whitelaw Brink, 2013 University of Guelph Collection at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre

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chapter three

Collecting Claude

Collecting etchings by the seventeenth-century landscape artist Claude Gellée le Lorrain is arduous these days, as all historic prints have become scarce and pricey. In the 1970s, when I began, it was only necessary to watch print-sellers’ catalogues, or visit their shops, to find desirable Claude and related prints at affordable prices. With the help of my colleague and friend George Wallace at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), who was buying prints for the university collection, I had access to some of the best dealers in the United Kingdom. It became clear that a variety of seventeenth-century landscape prints could be had from such London dealers as Craddock & Barnard on Museum Street, Christopher Mendez in Soho and on Jermyn Street, and Louise King across the river in Greenwich. First I bought Dutch prints, from Jacob van Ruisdael to Antoni Waterloo, until I realized that, of the leading seventeenth-century landscape painters Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain, Rosa was an etcher of quirky importance, while Claude was an etcher of beguiling genius. Poussin did not leave etchings by his own hand, and brief interest in Rosa’s etchings was quickly supplanted by fascination with Claude’s skill and sensibility as a print maker. Why landscape? The reason must be a rural family heritage, of farms, crops, and animals as a way of life. My father’s family were Netherlands cattle merchants and farmers from the late middle ages in Harderwyck and Wageningen, Gelderland, continuing through mid-seventeenth-century migration to New York, where they had been recruited to set up farming at Nieuwe Dorp (Hurley, New York) in the mid-Hudson region. The Brinks were always enterprising and successful farmers, migrating again in the late eighteenth century

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to Upper Canada in search of better land than what they found in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. First settling in Oxford County, various family members in following generations continued into Alberta and British Columbia, entering the farming, cattledealing, and meat-processing businesses. Similarly, in my mother’s Scottish family from Kelso, Roxboroughshire, cattle dealing was their business after arriving in Canada during the 1830s. William Whitelaw set up as a cattle dealer in Guelph to supply surrounding farmers with high-grade livestock imported from Scotland, where his fathers before him had also been cattlemen. William won international recognition for his champion breeds and became a leading citizen of Guelph. Can one be nostalgic for the hard life of pioneer farming and animal management? I am sufficiently removed from those rigors to be fascinated by a pre-industrial way of life that is little part of my own existence. I grew up with farms in the family but didn’t need to operate them or worry about crop yields and fluctuating prices. I was free to become historically and culturally minded, a student of the past and something of a collector and connoisseur of its representations. Collecting paintings, or even less costly drawings, from the relevant rural heritages was always out of the question, so I settled on etchings. As I spent quite a lot of time in Bloomsbury researching for a London University higher degree, it was only natural to become acquainted with the book and print shops. Little did I realize that I was living in perhaps the last era when foraging for small treasures at low prices was really possible. Subsequent sabbaticals found me more knowledgeable, and financially prepared, to buy what could still be found. I especially recall opening a stock drawer in a Museum Street shop to find a forgotten cache of Claude prints. I bought them all, including Les Deux paysages [The Two Landscapes] (circa 1630) and Étude d’une scene de brigands [Study with Brigands] (circa 1633). If I am not mistaken, these deft smalletched sketches have never since appeared on the market and may be seen in only a few museum collections. Back in Toronto, in a print shop closeout sale, I happened upon Claude’s more sophisticated La Danse au bord de l’eau [The Dance on the River-bank] (circa 1634) in a nicely printed example of the sixth state. This print is an absolute treasure

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rarely seen on the market these days, unless in a debased state printed after the plate had been re-cut. But my most significant finds were in Louise King’s shop in Greenwich, where I wish I’d bought still more. Her practice as a dealer seems to have been to obtain at auction good lesser prints, leaving the “plums” to the high-end dealers on Bond Street. Thus it happened in the 1970s that she had a large selection of later-impression Claude prints, many from the post 1816 printings in England, together with a few of earlier origin. I carefully went through her entire stock, choosing the best examples but leaving behind many that now would be thought quite desirable. Thus it was possible to round out a representative collection of Claude’s achievements in etching. It is often said that if you don’t see the very best states and impressions, you haven’t experienced Claude; this is very true, but the earliest states aren’t always aesthetically the most appealing. Discernment of detail is everything, with strength of impression and quality of paper varying a lot. Many of the twenty-five 1816 to 1826 Claude prints published by the London print merchants McCreery, Schultz, and others are quite skilful, often printed on very thin chine, or good grade wove paper to bring up sharp definition from the plates, which were still in good condition. These late prints can be made to appear even better by removing them from the card backing to which they were typically affixed. Paper restoration also does wonders for these once-scorned impressions. The English prints still speak for Claude long after the products of his own press, and other lifetime and early eighteenth-century impressions, have all but disappeared from the market. The “gold standard” prints by Claude Lorrain can be seen in certain public collections, and the experience is unforgettable. A connoisseur’s highest pleasure is to go through, one by one, the contents of certain file cases in the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum. Just by asking, you can handle probably the finest collection on earth of Claude’s etchings, including the legendary complete composition of Les chèvres [The Goats] (circa 1630–33) before the plate was cut to make two separate prints. Only this one impression from the full plate is known. I have had similar access to the fine Claudes in the Metropolitan Museum and New York Public Library, but there is nothing quite like

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gazing upon the “gold standard” prints collected mainly by the Reverend Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in the late eighteenth century and bequeathed to the British Museum. Claims for the present collection must be kept modest, as it is a catch-as-catch-can affair. However, there are specimens that give an idea of what absolutely first-rate Claude prints are like; for instance, Le Passage du gué [The Ford] (1634), a second state print on early laid paper that, judging from many verso annotations, has been cherished by collectors for a very long time. Similarly, Le Port de mer à la grosse tour [Harbour with a Large Tower] (circa 1641), a second state print on early laid paper of characteristic yellowish tinge with good margins, has the feel of being close to the best there is. To fill gaps, I’ve had the good fortune of assistance from the Belgian dealer Henk Van Walleghem, who has recently found some incredible survivals at affordable prices. On one occasion, I resorted to the distinguished Paris dealer Paul Proute to fill a gap, while the New York dealer Paul McCarron filled two others. Another fine specimen came from R.E. Lewis and Daughter in California, with earlier “finds” in the stock of Davidson Galleries in Seattle, Washington. Christopher Mendez in London located an exceptionally scarce item, which is now in my collection. Needless to say, these are the purchases that have made recent Claude collecting arduous and expensive. Only three of Claude’s etchings have eluded me, as they must everybody: L’Arabesque [Ornament with Head] (circa 1630), Paysage au dessinateur [Landscape with an Artist Drawing] (circa 1630), and Femme Assise [Seated Woman and other Sketches] (circa 1630), which are reproduced in Mannocci’s The Etchings of Claude Lorrain (1988) in plates no. 1, 2, and 7 respectively. Only the second of these is of consequence in judging the development of Claude’s landscape art. There are many highly desirable other states of prints in my collection that would cost a fortune if ever found. I had no idea, nosing around Bloomsbury print shops all those years ago, where it would lead. Yet assembling a representative collection of Claude’s most characteristic prints has been a rewarding task, no small part of facilitation being the World Wide Web and the very agreeable dealers one meets in that strange way. Claude would have been flabbergasted to hear how his prints would be sought and found.

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Further, I had not realized the extent of derivative Claude prints made in England, not to mention France and Italy. To assemble a good selection of these, illustrating the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British obsession with Claude, introduced me to another range of dealers too numerous and diverse to mention. Enlightened again by the British Museum’s holdings of Claudian prints by such engravers as Pond and Knapton, Vivares, Earlom, Lewis, and others, I set about to purchase presentable examples, recognizing that to cover the field today would be nearly impossible. Enough good examples have been found to combine with Claude’s original etchings, bearing out the thesis of this book: what remains of the once strong English landscape sensibility is, above all, thanks to Claude Gellée le Lorrain. Few artists in history have so awakened us to the power of landscape wherever it is seen. More than this, Claude was an optimist who proposed that people can live harmoniously in nature as long as they respect its integrity. Of course he had no idea of the disrupted environment to which industrial “progress” would lead, or of the complexities of human interaction. But he left us a vision of the dance of life in unsullied settings of which it is essential to be reminded. an drew br ink Greensville, on

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chapter three

Notes

chapter one 1 Marcel Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, vol. 1 (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), 41–2. 2 Michael Kitson, ed., Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis (London: British Museum Publications Ltd., 1978), 9f, 28f, 37–9. 3 Humphrey Wine, Claude: the Poetic Landscape, forward by Neil MacGregor (London: National Gallery Publications, 1994), 9. 4 Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documentary History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 204. Quoted from E. Jentsch, “Die Schreckensneurose Claude Lorrains,” Psychiatrische-neurologische Wochenschrift, XVII (1925) (Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, LXXIII). 5 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XII (London: Samuel Simmons, 1667), lines 586–7. 6 Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three

7

8

9 10

Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 36, 351f. Gervase Jackson-Stops, The English Country House in Perspective (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 88. “In the eighteenth century gardening was often seen as a way of recovering from affliction.” In Addison’s words, “delightful scenes, whether in nature, painting, or poetry, have a kindly influence on the body, as well as the mind, and not only serve to clear and brighten the imagination, but are able to disperse grief and melancholy.” Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700–1800 (London: Frank Cass, 1965; first published 1925), 84. For the pleasures of collecting and viewing prints in the eighteenth century, see 85f. T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760– 1830 (Oxford University Press, 1997), 48. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, second

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notes to pages 10–1 4

11

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12

13

14

edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 12. F.D. Klingender, edited and revised by Arthur Elton, Art and the Industrial Revolution (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), illustration 27; discussion 102. For Ruskin’s strictures on Claude see Modern Painters in The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds (London, 1904), vol. 5 (1856): 400–2; vol. 7 (1860): 322. Henry V.S. Ogden and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955), 69. For the first reference to Claude as a painter in an English book, see Sir William Sanderson, Graphice: The Use of the Pen and Pencil; Or, the Most Excellent Art of Painting (London, 1658), 66, 106. Lino Mannocci, The Etchings of Claude Lorrain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 19, note 9. In Fragments (1816), the landscape designer Humphry Repton spoke of the typical country villa’s library containing “books of poetry and books of prints.” Viewing prints in the library was a long-established pastime. (Gervase Jackson-Stops, The English Country House in Perspective, 88.) John Evelyn, Sculptura Historico-Technica: or, the History and Art of Engraving, fourth edition (London: Printed for J. Marks in St Martin’s Lane, 1770), 10, 221. Evelyn admired the pastoral

15 16

17

18 19

prints of Claudine Stella, Stefano Della Bella, and the Perelles over those of Claude. Quoted in Ogden and Ogden, 106. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1715), 40–1. In contrast, Sir Eilliam Freeman in 1718 praised Claude as one of the finest landscape painters who ever lived, notable for his “happy imitation of sunshine” (Letters on Several Occasions, 1765). Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning the Art, or Science of Design, Written from Italy” (1712) in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols, sixth edition Edn. (no publisher, 1737f). In 3: 399, he notes: “the publick has of late begun to express a relish for ingravings, drawings, copyings and for the original paintings of the chief Italian schools.” Michael Kitson, Studies in Claude and Poussin (London: The Pindar Press, 2000), 302. Jonathan Richardson, The Works: A New Edition, Corrected, with the Additions of An Essay on the Knowledge of Prints, and Cautions to Collectors (Printed at Strawberry-Hill, Sold by B. White etc., 1792), 271. Richardson was much more approving of Claude’s paintings than he was of the etchings: “Of all the LandskipPainters Claude Lorrain has the most beautiful and pleasing ideas; the most rural, and of our own times” (quoted in Manwaring, 38). Richardson also collected Claude’s drawings.

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n otes to pages 15– 2 1

20 Richardson, The Works (London: T. Davis, 1773), 247. 21 William Gilpin, An Essay upon Prints: Containing Remarks upon the Principles of Picturesque Beauty (London: G. Scott for J. Robson, 1768), 155. 22 William Gilpin, Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To which is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 21. 23 Mannocci, The Etchings of Claude Lorrain, 21. 24 Antony Griffiths, ed., Landmarks in Print Collecting: Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum since 1753 (London: The British Museum Press, 1996), 275. This representative collection of European prints was assembled mainly in the 1780s and 1790s by the Rev Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode (1730–1799), so it does not represent English collecting in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 25 John Thomas Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch and Flemish Painters (London: J. Smith and Son, 1837), 192. 26 Arthur M. Hind, Claude Lorrain and Modern Art (Cambridge, 1926), 15–17. Hind regarded The Cowherd (1636) and Sunrise (1634) as Claude’s highest achievements, with the large Country Dance (circa 1637) and Cattle Drinking (1635) as his least successful, mainly for technical reasons. See Hind, A History of Engraving &

27

28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36

Etching from the Fifteenth Century to the Year 1914 (New York: Dover, 1963), 163. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (New York: Meridian, 1956), 221, 226, 229, 231. By 1925 Fry took a more severe view of Claude’s art, calling it “counterfeit bad pictures,” but he did not retract his original essay “Claude,” published in the Burlington Magazine (1907). (Denys Sutton, ed., The Letters of Roger Fry (New York, 1972), vol. 2, 561.) William Hazlitt, “On Gusto” in The Complete Works, ed. P.R. Howe (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1933), vol. 4, 79. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Imagination in Landscape Painting (Boston: 1895), 181–5. Hamerton did not say exactly which “engravings” he saw or whether any were actual etchings by Claude. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Landscape (London: Seeley & Co., 1885), 324. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Etching & Etchers (London: Macmillan & Co., 1875), 157. Ibid., 158. Ibid. George Grahame, Claude Lorrain Painter & Etcher (London: Seeley & Co., 1895), 79. Michael Kitson, Introduction to the Art of Claude Lorrain (London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1969), 5. H. Diane Russell, Claude Lorrain 1600–1682 (New York: George Braziller in association with the National Gallery, Washington, 1982), 299.

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notes to pages 2 2– 94

37 Michael Kitson, “The Etchings of Claude Lorrain” in Studies in Claude and Poussin, 302f.

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chapter three 1 Mannocci, The Etchings of Claude Lorrain, 258–9. 2 Ibid., 284. 3 Kitson, Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis, 96. 4 Marcel Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: the Drawings, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 976: catalogue 361. 5 Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: the Paintings, 1: 41. 6 Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: the Paintings, 1: 42. 7 John Thomas Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch and Flemish Painters (London: J. Smith & Son, 1837), 342. 8 Kitson, Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis, 28f. 9 Marcel Roethisberger, The Paintings, Volume 1, Critical Catalogue (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), 84. 10 There is a small oval portrait of Claude Lorrain published in England and worthy of mention. Its countenance reverts to the furrowed brow “peasant” Claude but is brighter and less sad than Josiah Boydell’s (1777) version. It was drawn by John Jackson (R.A.) and engraved by William Ward (A.R.A.) from an original belonging to the Earl of Mulgrave. The print was

published September 1, 1825 by W.B. Cooke, 9 Soho London. (See figure 1, frontispiece) 11 Roethisberger, The Paintings, Volume 1, Critical Catalogue, 86. chapter four 1 Roethisberger, The Paintings, Volume 1, Critical Catalogue, 55. 2 Lawrence Otto Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck in Dutch and Flemish Art: Convention, Rhetoric, and Interpretation (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 140–7. 3 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (Original publisher unknown, 1711), 11: 68–73. 4 Joseph Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator, 411 (1712). 5 Virgil, Eclogue I (37 bce), lines 9–10. For the happy husbandman, see Virgil’s Georgics, Book II, 458f. 6 Kitson, Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis, 59. 7 Richard Beresford, A Dance to the Music of Time by Nicolas Poussin (London: The Wallace Collection, 1995), 15f, 28. For a study of classical sources and meanings of the dance in Renaissance Italy, see: John C. Meagher, “The Dance and the Masques of Ben Jonson” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25, no. 3/4 (1962): 258–62; E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943), ch. 8, “The Cosmic Dance.” In Greco-Roman paganism, the dance was celebrated by Pan who inspired

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notes to pages 94– 101

8

9

10

11 12 13 14

shepherds, nymphs, and goats to dance by stream side: see Orphic Hymn XI (Thomas Taylor, ed., The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, London: Bertram Dobell, 1896), 34f. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: the Paintings, 1:56. See also: Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie de’ Professori del Disegno, Da Cimabue in qua, Secolo V. dal 1610. al 1670 [Notice of the Professors of Design, from Cimabue to now, from 1610– 1670] (Published posthumously, 1681), Decennale 4: 353. Mario Chiarini, “The Importance of Fillipo Napoletano for Claude’s Early Formation,” in Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682: A Symposium, ed. Pamela Askew (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1984), 13–26 Ann Sutherland Harris, Landscape Painting in Rome, 1595–1675 (New York: Richard L. Feigen & Co., 1985), 208. Anthony Blunt, Poussin (London: Pallas Athene, 1995), 327. Ibid., 328. Ibid. Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700 (London: Penguin Books, 1980), 301. Claude may well have become acquainted with the general mythology of the sun from the most popular source book of his day, Natale Conti’s Mythologiae (1567f). See vol. I, book 4, ch. 17, 441–9, “On the Sun,” in Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 316 (Arizona

Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006). But Claude was much more concerned with atmospheric sunlight rather than its often confusing associations with mythological personages. 15 Marsilio Ficino, The Book of the Sun, transl. Geoffrey Cornelius et al. (http://www.users. globalnet.co.uk/~alfar2/ficino.htm) [accessed 9 July 2011]. The late Hellenistic or early Roman “Orphic Hymns,” editions of which were readily available in Claude’s Rome, contain the remarkable song of praise “To the Sun.” The sun’s task is “to fill the world with harmony divine,” the cosmos being heliocentric (ed. Taylor, Mystical Hymns, 23). This view of the sun as all-giving divine radiance is also strongly present in The Corpus Hermeticum, an esoteric text probably of ancient Egyptian origin, again readily available in Claude’s time. See book 16, 6–10, Clement Salaman et al., eds, The Way of Hermes (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2000), 75–6. Judging from chapter 4 on Gian Paolo Lomazzo in Moshe Barasch’s Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York University Press, 1978) applications are suggested of Lomazzo’s theories of light and colour to Claude’s work. Lomazzo’s treatise Trattato dell’arte della pictura, scultura ed architettura (Milan, 1584) is sympathetic to both Ficino’s Neoplatonic theory of light and to the occult doctrine of light in Cornelis

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16 17 18 19 20 148

21 22

23

Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1531) – a combination possible only in the CounterReformation. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber & Faber, 1956), 357. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 64. The idea of sunlight’s foremost importance was taken up by Neoplatonic poets in the court of Lorenzo de Medici (“The Magnificent”) during the early 1480s. Giovanni Francisco Nesi wrote hymns to the sun, while Michele Marullo, a refugee Greek from Byzantium, similarly composed poems in praise of the sun and nature’s power (see Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art, 49–50). Ibid., 59. Humphrey Wine, Claude: The Poetic Landscape (London, National Gallery, 1994), 34, 36–7. A useful discussion of light from Platonism to Christian Mysticism is found in “The Illumination of the Self ” (ch. 4) in Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1910). Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times, Vol. II, Treatise V viz. The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody; Being a Recital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects (1709), 344–5.

24 Ibid., 371f. 25 Ibid., 393–4. 26 Sir William Freeman, Letters on Several Occasions (London: Printed for R. Baldwin, 1758; new edition, 1765), 14–15. Freeman added a verse also praising light: “AAh! were that touch the living pencil mine/ That artful nature, which Lorrain, was thine/ Some glowing canvass where the noon-tide ray/ Shone forth effulgent in the blaze of day” (38). In 1794, Sir Uvedale Price gave Claude’s light a moral purpose, writing in An Essay on the Picturesque that Claude induces a mental state of repose, of which the pictures are the image: when the viewer “feels that mild and equal sunshine of the soul which warms and cheers, but neither inflames nor irritates, / his heart seems to dilate with happiness, he is disposed to every act of kindness and benevolence, to love and cherish all around him” (109). There is no clearer statement of the power of Claude’s art to alter mood. 27 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: Pelican Books, 1956), 83. 28 The minor Claudians are studied by Elizabeth Manwaring in Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England, page 72f; for engravers see page 82f. 29 C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London: The Phaidon Press, 1951), 82. 30 Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion (Toronto: Longmans, 1975), 275.

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notes to pages 112 –119

31 John Constable, Discourses: The Origin of Landscape, ed. R.B. Beckett (Suffolk Records Society, vol. 14, 1970), 52–3. Claude’s St Ursula in the National Gallery is singled out for expressing “the evanescent character of light” (53). 32 Arcadia Home Page, 2, 6–7: http://faculty.uccb. ns.ca/philosophy/arcadia/frontpage.htm [accessed 9 July 2011]. 33 Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Between Imagination and Reality (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 11. The acquisition of the Altieri Claudes, from a noble Roman family was considered the outstanding coup for English collectors in the nineteenth century. They are: Landscape with the Father of Psyche Sacrificing at the Temple of Apollo (1663) and Landscape with the Landing of Aeneas in Latium (1675), its later pendant (see Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: the Paintings, II: 369–70). These paintings, perhaps Claude’s finest, remain together at Anglesey Abbey, property of the National Trust. 34 Ibid., 11. 35 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, 109. 36 Quoted in G.E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Yale University Press, 2001), 405. The letter to Blake’s first biographer Alexander Gilchrist (1863) is undated. 37 Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), 23–4.

38 A.H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer (London: Seely & Co. Ltd., 1892), 366. 39 Raymond Lister, Edward Calvert (London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1962), 18. 40 Robin Tanner, Double Harness (London: Impact Books, 1987), 172. 41 W.B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben” in The Collected Poems (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1955), 400. Still later, Claude would be pressed into satirical comment on violence against nature in post-industrial society. The British street artist Banksy (born 1974) produced three linked bucolic Claudian paintings invaded by alien objects: a helicopter, a tall surveillance pole with sensors, and a police tape signifying that this is a crime scene. Is Banksy’s Claude thus at the point of no return, or is revival still possible? 42 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 411 in The Works, vol. 3, ed. Henry G. Bohn (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856). 43 Ibid., 393–4. 44 Ibid., 423. 45 Ibid., 395. Addison’s statement recalls that of Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (sixth edition, 1651–52) part 2, section 2, “Cure of Melancholy: Air Rectified”: “A good prospect alone will ease melancholy,” ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: J.M. Dent, 1932) vol. 2, 68. Burton remarks on many English scenes where “I have looked about me with great delight.” This

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notes to pages 119–2 4

recalls a long tradition, seen for example in Leon Battista Alberti’s Ten Books of Architecture (1450), of looking to idyllic landscape to ease, and perhaps heal, the afflicted mind. 46 Ibid., 400.

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biographical essentials 1 The dates 1600–1682 are recorded on Claude’s tombstone in the church of SS Trinita dei Monti, but there is argument for 1604/5 as his date of birth. See Michael Kitson, Claude to Corot: The Development of Landscape Painting in France (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1990), 30. 2 Both Joachim von Sandrart’s and Filippo Baldinucci’s brief biographies of Claude are printed in full, as is Claude’s “Testament and Inventory,” 64f. Quoted in Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, I: 47–8. 3 Quoted in Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, I: 48, 60. 4 Quoted in Marcel Rothlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1968), 5. Regarding the reliability of Lione Pascoli’s (1674–1744) Vite de’Pittori (Rome: 1730), vol. I, 20; see also Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, I: 77.

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chapter three

Selected Bibliography

Addison, Joseph. “The Pleasures of the Imagination.” In The Works, volume 3. Edited by Richard Hurd. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856. Ashton, T.S. The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Askew, Pamela. Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682: A Symposium. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1984. Barasch, Moshe. Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1978. Barrell, John. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Bermingham, Ann and John Brewer. The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Bentley Jr., G.E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Beresford, Richard. A Dance to the Music of Time

by Nicolas Poussin. London: The Wallace Collection, 1995. Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700. London: Penguin Books, 1980. – Poussin. London: Pallas Athene, 1995. Chilvers, Ian, ed. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Art and Artists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. London: Pelican Books, 1956. – The Romantic Rebellion. Toronto: Longmans, 1975. Clayton, Timothy. The English Print, 1688–1802. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Constable, John. Discourses: The Origin of Landscape, volume 14. Edited by R.B. Beckett. Suffolk Record Society, 1970. Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols. London: Harvill Press, 1961. – The Two and The One. New York: Harper Torchbook, 1969. Evelyn, John. Sculptura: Historico-Technica: Or,

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The History and Art of Engraving, fourth edition. London: Printed for J. Marks in St Martin’s Lane, 1770. Ficino, Marsilio, The Book of the Sun. Translated by Geoffrey Cornelis et al. http://www.users. globelnet.co.uk/-alfar2/ficio.htm (accessed 9 July 2011). Freeman, Sir William. Letters on Several Occasions. London: Printed for R. Baldwin, 1758 (New Edition, 1765). Fry, Roger. Vision and Design. New York: Meridian, 1956. Gilpin, William. An Essay upon Prints: Containing Remarks upon the Principles of Picturesque Beauty. London: G. Scott for J. Robson, 1772. – Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting. London: R. Blamire, 1792. Gascoigne, Bamber. How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Goedde, Lawrence Otto. Tempest and Shipwreck in Dutch and Flemish Art: Convention, Rhetoric and Interpretation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. Gowing, Lawrence. Turner: Between Imagination and Reality. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966. Grahame, George. Claude Lorrain, Painter and Etcher. London: Seeley & Co., 1895.

Griffiths, Antony, ed. Landmarks in Print Collecting: Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum since 1753. London: The British Museum Press, 1996. – Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques. London: The British Museum Press, 1996. Grigson, Geoffrey. Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years. London: Kegan Paul, 1947. Hamerton, Philip Gilbert. Etching and Etchers. London: Macmillan & Co., 1875. – Imagination in Landscape Painting. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895. – Landscape. London: Seeley & Co., 1885. Harris, Ann Sutherland. Landscape Painting in Rome, 1595–1675. New York: Richard Feigen & Co., 1985. Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works. Edited by P.R. Howe. London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1933. Hermann, Sven and Arnold Bruntjen. John Boydell (1719–1804): A Study of Art Patronage and Publishing in Georgian London. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Hind, Arthur M. A History of Engraving & Etching, third edition, revised 1921. New York: Dover, 1963. – Claude Lorrain and Modern Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926. Hunter, Richard and Ida Macalpine. Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535–1860. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

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Jackson-Stops, Gervase. The English Country House in Perspective. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Kitson, Michael. Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis. London: British Museum Publications Ltd, 1978. – “Claude Gellée, called Lorrain.” In Claude to Corot: The Development of Landscape Painting in France, edited by Alan Wintermute. New York: Colnaghi in association with The University of Washington Press, 1990. – “Introduction” to The Art of Claude Lorrain. London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1969. – Studies in Claude and Poussin. London: The Pindar Press, 2000. Klingender, F.D., ed. Art and the Industrial Revolution. Revised by Arthur Elton. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost, second edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. Leslie, C.R. Memoirs of the Life of John Constable. London: The Phaidon Press, 1951. Lippincott, Louise. Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond. Pittsburgh: Caliban Books, 1983. Lister, Raymond. Edward Calvert. London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1962. Mannocci, Lino. The Etchings of Claude Lorrain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988.

Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700–1800. London: Frank Cass, 1965. Ogden, Henry V.S. and Margaret S. Ogden. English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955. Palmer, A.H. The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer. London: Seely & Co. Ltd, 1892. Pattison, Mme Mark (Lady Dilke). Claude Lorrain, sa Vie et ses Oeuvres, d’aprais des Documents Inedits. Paris: J. Rouam, 1884. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Faber & Faber, 1956. Richardson, Jonathan. The Works: I. The Theory of Painting. II. Essay on the Art of Criticism so far as it relates to Painting. III. The Science of a Connoisseur. London: T. Davis, 1773. – The Works, A New Edition, corrected, with the Addition of An Essay on the Knowledge of Prints, and Cautions to Collectors. London: Printed at Strawberry-Hill for B. White & Son, Fleet Street; T. and J. Egerton, Whitehall; J. Debrett, Piccidilly; R. Faulder, and W. Miller, New BondStreet; J. Cuthell, Middle Row; J. Barker, Russell-Court; and E. Jeffery, Pall Mall, 1792. Rothlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain, The Paintings, volume 1. Critical Catalogue, volume 2. Illustrations. First published by Yale University Press, 1961; New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979.

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– Claude Lorrain, The Drawings, volume 1. Catalogue, volume 2. Plates. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. Ruskin, John. The Complete Works, 39 volumes. Edited by E.T. Cook and A.D.O. Wedderburn. London: Allen; New York: Longman’s Green, 1903–12. Russell, H. Diane, Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682. New York: George Braziller in association with The National Gallery, Washington, 1982. Sanderson, William. Graphice: The Use of Pen and Pencil. Or, the Most Excellent Art of Painting. London: Printed for Robert Crofts, 1658. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. 3 volumes, sixth edition. No publisher, 1737f. Smith, John Thomas. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters. 8th Edition (Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorraine, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze). London: Smith and Son, 1837. Solkin, David H. Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction. London: The Tate Gallery, 1982. Tanner, Robin. Double Harness: An Autobiography. London: Impact Books, 1987. Tillyard, E.M.W. The Elizabethan World Picture. New York: Vintage Books, n.d. (first published 1943). Warrell, Ian. Turner et le Lorrain. France: Hazan, 2002. Watkin, David. The English Vision: The Pictur-

esque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1982. Wine, Humphrey. Claude: The Poetic Landscape. London: National Gallery Publications, 1994. Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot. Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documentary History from Antiquity to the French Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton, 1969. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems. London: Macmillan & Co., 1955. volumes containing prints by (and after) claude lorrain Chamberlaine, F.S.A., J. (Keeper of the King’s Medals and Drawings). Original Designs of the Most Celebrated Masters of the Bolognese, Roman, Florentine, and Venetian Schools; Comprising some of the Works of Leonardo Da Vinci, The Caracci, Claude Lorraine, Raphael, Michael Angelo, The Poussins and others, in His Majesty’s Collection; Engraved by Bartolozzi, P.W. Tomkins, Schiavonetti, Lewis, and other eminent engravers; with Biographical and Historical Sketches of L. Da Vinci and the Caracci. London: Printed by W. Bulmer and Co., Shakespeare-Press, Cleveland-Row; Sold by G. and W. Nicol, Booksellers to His Majesty, Pall-Mall; White and Cochrane, Fleet-Street; and Colnaghi and Co., CockspurStreet, 1812. Cooke, W.B. Beauties of Claude Lorrain Consisting of Twenty Four Landscapes Selected from The

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Liber Veritatis and Engraved on Steel by Eminent Engravers. From a Brilliant Copy in the Possession of His Grace the Duke of Bedford. London: Published by W. B. Cooke, 9 Soho Square, 1825. Earlom, Richard and John Boydell. Liber Veritatis: or, a Collection of Two Hundred Prints after the Original Designs of Claude Le Lorrain, in the Collection of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, Executed by Richard Earlom in the Manner and Taste of the Drawings, to which is added A Descriptive Catalogue of Each Print. Together with the names of those for whom, and the Places for which the Original Pictures were first painted (taken from the hand-writing of Claude Le Lorrain himself on the back of each drawing) and of the present possesors of many of the original pictures. 2 volumes. London: John Boydell, 1777. – Liber Veritatis; or, A collection of prints, after the original designs of Claude Le Lorrain; in the collections of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, Richard Payne Knight, Benjamin West, P.R.A., Charles Lambert, Edward Turnor, George Gosling, and Joseph Farrington, esqrs. Executed by Richard Earlom. London: Boydell and Co., 1819 (volume 3; issued in parts from 1802–17). Knapton, Charles and Arthur Pond. Prints in Imitation of Drawings. London: Knapton and Pond, 1735/6. – 48 Engraved Plates after Claude Lorraine, Gaspard Poussin and Others. London: Knapton and Pond, 1741–46. Lewis, F.C. Liber Studiorum of Claude Lorrain,

Engraved From the Drawings in the British Museum. London: F.C. Lewis, 53 Charlotte St., Portland Place, 1837/40. McCreary, J. A Collection of Original Etchings (200). London: Printed by J. McCreary, BlackHorse-Court, Fleet-Street, 1816. Re-issued by G. Schultz, 13 Poland St., Oxford St, 1816; Schultz and Dean, 1816; J. Kay, Welbeck St., Cavendish Square, 1826, and there appear to have been others, sometimes lacking title pages.

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chapter three

Index

Addison, Joseph, 89, 117–20 Alberti, Leon Battista, xii archetype, 85, 106 architecture, 5, 8, 18, 66–8, 95 Baldinucci, Filippo, 94–5, 122–3 Barrière, Dominique, 73–4, 86 Beaumont, Joseph, 111 beatus ille, 65, 73 beatus vir, 67, 101 Blake, William, 18, 114–17 Boydell, John, 9, 11, 67, 76–80, 82–3 Boydell, Josiah, 81–2 Bril, Paul, 80, 95, 122 British Museum, 4, 9, 16–17, 21–2, 66, 77, 80–1, 83, 90, 111, 139–41 Brown, Lancelot, “Capability,” 65–6 Callot, Jacques, 21, 72, 97 Calvert, Edward, 114, 116–17 Cambridge Platonism, 107, 114 Campanella, Tomasso, 98–9

Canot, Pierre Charles, 75–6 Cavendish, William. See Devonshire Cheyne, George, 7 Christian Humanism, 5, 97–8, 109, 117, 124. See also Humanism Claude “Glass,” 5 Coalbrookdale, 10–11 Coke, Thomas (1st Lord of Leicester), 3, 12 Constable, John, 5, 111–13 Cooke, William Bernard, 9, 79–80 Devonshire, 2nd Duke of (William Cavendish), 4, 65, 77; 5th Duke of (William Cavendish), 79 Dujardin, Karel, 69 Duke of Bedford, 79–80 Earlom, Richard, 9, 11, 17, 67–8, 76–81, 83, 101 Elsheimer, Adam, 96–7, 122 engraving, 71–2 English malady, 118; The English Malady, 7. See also melancholy Evelyn, John, 12

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in dex

Ficino, Marsilio, 98–102, 104, 106–8, 123 ferme ornée, 66, 89

158

Gainsborough, Thomas, 5 Galilei, Galileo, 99 Gilpin, William, 15–6, 18, 111–12, 118 Golden Age, 6–8, 10, 22, 90, 115 Goudt, Hendrick, 96 Graham, Richard, 13, 116 Grahame, George, 19–20 Grand Tour, 7, 11, 88, 109 Gray, Thomas, 5, 112 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 18–21 Hoare, Henry, 69, 89 Holl, William, 82 Horace, 8, 90; Horatian, 65, 67, 90, 107 Humanism, 100, 123

90–92, 109, 114, 124; heir of, 124 Mannocci, Lino, 11–12, 21–2, 73 Mason, James, 8, 14, 75 Massimi, Cardinal Carlo Camillo, 76, 100–2 McCreery, J., 73–4, 139 melancholy, 6–7, 118–19; Anatomy of Melancholy, 7; melancholia, 88. See also English malady mezzotint, 71–2, 77–8, 81–2, 93, 112 Middiman, Samuel, 77 Milton, John, 5–7, 115 More, Henry, 107, 114 Napoletano, Filippo, 95–6 Nash, John, 68 National Gallery (London), 3, 68, 76, 84, 87, 111, 113 nature mysticism, 6 Neo-classicism, 5 Neo-Platonism, 99, 102, 106–7

Industrial Revolution, xi, 8–10; industrialism, 9, 119 Ovid, xi, 3, 5, 8, 105, 124; Ovidian, 87, 100–1 Keats, John, 5 Kent, William, 5, 65–6, 88; at Holkham Hall, 4, 16, 65 Knapton, Charles, 75 Knight, Richard Payne, 9, 65–8, 80–1, 111–12; Downton Castle, 67–8 landscape design, 5, 65, 68, 89 Lewis, Frederick Christian, 9, 76–7, 81 Liber Veritatis, 4, 6, 9, 11, 17, 65, 68, 74–80, 82, 86–7,

Palmer, Samuel, xi, 18, 114–17 picturesque, 5, 16, 67–9, 88–9, 111–13 Plato, 98, 100–4, 107–8 Plotinus, 98, 100–4, 108 Pond, Arthur, 75, 77 Pope, Alexander, 14, 65, 88 Poussin, Nicolas, 3, 5, 13, 77, 89, 92–4, 99–100, 105, 109–10, 123; Dance of Human Life 93–4. See also Stoicism

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in dex

preparatory drawing, 72, 86, 87 Price, Uvedale, 9, 65–6, 68, 111–12, 118 Pye, John, 77 Renaissance, xii, 100, 105–6, 123, 146 Repton, Humphrey, 68 Richardson, Jonathan, 13–15, 18 Rijn, Rembrandt van, 17–22, 94 Romanticism, 111, 119 Rosa, Salvator, 3, 5, 12–13, 89, 109–10, 137 Rubens, Peter Paul, 94 Ruskin, John, 10, 16, 18, 20, 70, 114 Sandrart, Joachim von, 82–3, 122–3 Schultze, G., 74 Seaton Delaval Hall, 68 Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 107–9 Shenstone, William, 9, 67, 89 Smith, John Thomas, 17, 76, 109–10, 123 Spenser, Edmund, 5, 106–7 Stoicism, 96–7, 99, 105 Swanevelt, Herman Van, 69–70, 83, 122 Symonds, Richard, 11 Tassi, Agostino, 86, 95–6, 121–2 Thomson, James, 5 Turner, J.M.W., 5, 10, 113–14 Virgil, xi, 3, 5–6, 8, 90, 93, 105, 116, 124; Virgilian, 10, 69, 73, 89–90, 100

Vivares, Francis, 8, 10, 14, 75–8, 93, 112 Walpole, Horace, 14, 112 Wals, Gottfried, 96–7, 121–2 Walton, Izaak, 6, 108 Waterloo, Antoni, 15 Wilson, Richard, 5, 110, 117 Woollett, William, 8, 14, 75 Yeats, William Butler, 117

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