Claude Lorrain (Gellée)

1604/5?-1682 • French • Painter • Baroque

"Claude Lorrain is a painter who carried landscape to perfection, that is to human perfection." - John Constable, 1836

Claude, who was born in France, went to Rome to become a pastry cook. He found work in the home of the painter Agostino Tassi, and the die was cast. By the 1630s he had established his own reputation as a landscapist. As did his friend and countryman POUSSIN, Claude remained an expatriate in Rome throughout his life. He was entranced by the countryside outside the city, the Roman campagna. In this environment he saw the poetry of light, a bucolic serenity, and the romance of Virgil's poetry. In contrast to Poussin, whose landscapes are formed according to rational geometric progression, those of Claude are atmospheric and airy, open and light. Where Poussin's landscapes were preferred by intellectuals, Claude's PATRONS were from the aristocracy. He invented a compositional technique of using trees or buildings or even ships to "frame" the outer edges of the picture, and a foreground coulisse, or space for the viewer to slip in to the picture, so to speak. In the middle ground there is likely to be a basinlike body of water, a horizon with hills, and heavy atn10spheric PERSPECTIVE in the background. (See also REPOUSSOIR) Claude resolutely introduced asymmetry, which gave great weight to one side of the picture, but he carried off potential imbalance through a bowl of sky. He also reduced the human figure to almost insignificant dimensions. The pastora I mood of Claude's serene, ideal landscapes had great influence on late- 18th- and early-19th-century European and American painters and came to epitomize the notion of the PICTURESQUE.