Claude Lorrain
Categories: 1911 Britannica | 1604 births | 1682 deaths | French painters | Landscape artists
Claude Lorrain (Lorraine, c1604 - Rome, November 23, 1682) was a French painter, active in 17th century Italy, and considered a great Baroque landscape painters.
He was born of very poor parents at the village of Chamagne in Lorraine. His actual name was Claude Gellée but is better known by the province in which he was born. Orphan by age of twelve, he went to live at Freiburg with an elder brother, Jean Gele, a wood-carver. He afterwards went to Rome to seek a livelihood; then to Naples, to apprentice for 2 years under Godfrey Waals. He returned to Rome, in April 1625 and apprenticed with the now-infamous [[Augustin Tassi]. He apparently was able to tour in Italy, France and a part of Germany, including his native Lorraine, suffering numerous misadventures. Karl Dervent, painter to the duke of Lorraine, kept him as assistant for a year; and he painted at Nancy the architectural subjects on the ceiling of the Carmelite church.
Mature works
In 1627 returned to Rome. Here, painting two landscapes for Cardinal Bentivoglio, he earned the patronage of Pope Urban VIII and from about 1637 he rapidly rose into celebrity as a painter of landscapes and seascapes. He apparently befriended fellow-Frenchman Nicolas Pouissan, and they would travel the countryside seeking vistas to paint. Though both have been called landscape painters, in Poussin, the landscape is secondary background incident. For Lorraine, despite the tiny figurines busy in mythologic or biblical activities in some corner of the canvas, the land, sea, and air are the subject.
By report, he often engaged other artists to paint them for him, including Courtois and Filippo Lauri. Indeed, he was wont to remark to those purchasing his pictures that he sold them the landscape, and the figures were gratis.
In order to avoid a repetition of the same subject, and also to detect the very numerous spurious copies of his works, he made tinted outline drawings (in six paper books prepared for this purpose) of all those pictures which were transmitted to different countries; and on the back of each drawing he wrote the name of the purchaser. These books he named Libri di yenta. This valuable work has been engraved and published, and has always been highly esteemed by students of the art of landscape. Claude, suffered much from gout, died in Rome at the age of eighty-two, on the 21 November or perhaps 23 November 1682, leaving his wealth, which was considerable, between his only surviving relatives, a nephew and an adopted daughter (possibly his niece).
Modern Assessment
Landscape painting was not till the mid-1600s thought to be a subject fit for painting in Italian circles. It was the Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Bril, who more detached from Rome, practiced more of this genre. Both Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino had painted landscapes, though their major works were mythic or religious. Landscape painting as a subject has a definitive non-classic and secular thematic, not till then consonant with Italian art taste, which seemed to focus and relish on the ability to outdo the ancients, the masters, and sculptors in the depiction of the human form and of scenes worthy of high painting, that is mythic or religious scenes.
In this fashion, Lorraine is ahead of his time. He paints in a pre-romantic era of a nature, no wild, but semi-restrained. These are not the untamed wilds, but the pastoral fields home to a golden age. If urban settings are depicted, such as in the ports, they are windows to a wider world.
Painting of Lorraine are found in National Gallery, London and Louvre; the landscapes in the Altieri and Colonna palaces in Rome. He himself regarded a landscape which he painted in the Villa Madama, being a cento of various views with great abundance and variety of leafage, and a composition of "Esther and Ahasuerus," as his finest works; . He etched a series of twenty-eight landscapes, fine impressions of which are greatly prized.
Claude was a man of amiable and simple character, very kind to his pupils, a patient and unwearied worker; in his own sphere of study, his mind was stored (as we have seen) with observation and knowledge, but he continued an unlettered man till his death. This painter Standart is the chief direct authority for the facts of Claude's life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professoni del disegno).
Partial Anthology of Works
- 1. Landscape with Goatherd, 1636, National Gallery, London.
- 2. Port with Villa Medici, 1637, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
- 3. Finding of Moses, 1638. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
- 4. Seaport at Sunset, 1639, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
- 5. Embarkation of Saint Paula Romana at Ostia, 1639, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
- 6. The Embarkation of St. Ursula, 1641, National Gallery at London.
- 7. The Disembarkation of Cleopatra at Tarsus, 1642, canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
- 8. The Judgement of Paris, 1645-46, National Gallery of Art at Washington D.C.
- 9. Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah, 1648, National Gallery at London.
- 10. View of La Crescenza, 1648-50, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
- 11. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, detail, 1651 or 1661, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.
- 12. The Trojan Women Setting Fire to their Fleet, detail, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
- 13. The Departure of Hagar and Ishmael, 1668,Pinakothek at Munich.
- 14. Seaport, 1674, Pinakothek at Munich.
- 15. Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Silvia, 1682, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
- 16. Brook and Two Bridges
- 17. Voyage of Jacob
- 18. Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
- 19. The Angel's Visit
See also Victor Cousin, Sur Claude Gele (1853); MF Sweetser, Claude Lorrain (1878); Lady Dilke, Claude Lorrain (1884).
This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.de:Claude Lorrain fr:Claude Gellée ja:クロード・ロラン ru:Лоррен, Клод sv:Claude Lorrain