J18 G281
895G

J

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

CLAUDE LORRAIN

PAINTER

ETCHER

By

GEORGE GRAHAME

LONDON
SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND
NEW YORK, MACMILLAN AND CO.
I895

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES
PAGE
Cleopatra landing at Tarsus. Louvre Frontispiece.
The Flight into Egypt. Hermitage Museum . to face 42
The Brigands. Etching, reproduced by Amand Durand ,, „ 70
The Flock in Stormy Weather. Etching, reproduced by Amand Durand . „ „ 78

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

PAGE

Landscape with Figures. Dresden Gallery. By permission of Messrs. Braun,
Clement & Cie. 9
Driving the Cattle to the Meadows. From the Etching by Claude 1 1
Portrait of Claude. From Sandrart's " Academia Nobilissima. Artis Picturae."
Nuremberg, 1683 . 13
Seaport, with large Tower. From the Etching by Claude 17
Old Port of Marseilles. From a Pen drawing . 19
Tivoli. From a sketch in the British Museum 21
Sketch from Nature British Museum . 23
A Seaport. From a Drawing in the British Museum 27
Cardinal Bentivoglio, by Van Dyck. Pitti Gallery. By permission of G. Brogi . 29
The Village Dance. Louvre. By permission of Messrs. Braun, Clement & Cie. 33
The Mill, or the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca. National Gallery 37
The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. National Gallery . . 39

4 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
S. Paula leaving Ostia. Dulwich Gallery A.'X
The Tempietto, on the Trinita de' Monti, Rome .
Egeria and her Nymphs, painted in 1669. Naples Museum. By permission of
G. Brogi 47
The Enchanted Castle, "Liber Veritatis." From the mezzotint by R. Earlom . 49
The Finding of Moses, " Liber Veritatis." From the mezzotint by R. Earlom . . 59
Study; from the " Chalcographie du Louvre." By permission . • 71
Italian Seaport, with Boats. British Museum . 72
The Arch of Titus. British Museum 73
Study for the Embarkation of St. Ursula. British Museum 75
Dance under the Trees. From the Etching by Claude 81
Dance by the Water Side. From the Etching by Claude . 83

*st* The Author of the following chapters desires to thank those owners of Claude's works in
England who have kindly allowed him access to their collections ; and also to acknow
ledge his indebtedness to Lady Dilie's admirable volume, " Claude Lorrain, sa Vie et
ses CEuvres."

CLAUDE LORRAIN

CHAPTER I
CLAUDE LORRAIN  HIS CENTURY AND HIS SURROUNDINGS
Claude Gellee, more familiarly known as Claude le Lorrain, was
born with the seventeenth century and died in the eighty-second year
of it. With the exception of his boyhood and two years of wandering,
the whole of his long life was passed and all his work was executed
in or near Rome. " An age," it has been said, " is like climate ; the
hardier may escape its influence in much, but the hardiest will not
escape its influence entirely."
Claude's temperament, so far from being a hardy one, was somewhat
feminine. It certainly did not escape the influence of his age. It may
be well, therefore, before entering into any details about the artist's
life, before attempting to appraise his work, to say a few words about
his century and his surroundings.
The seeds of corruption sown by the sixteenth century began to
germinate before that century had passed away. In the next they pro
duced the most noxious crop of weeds that ever choked the growth of
Humanity. The freedom, the vigour, and the originality of the earlieA
Renaissance had given place to an absolutism which set its stamp on
every manifestation of men's minds — religion, politics, letters, art.
Every conception and every production of the age was cramped into )
an artificial mould, or escaped from it only to burst into eccentricity or '
bombast.

6 CLAUDE LORRAIN
In art this is peculiarly evident.
The sixteenth century closed, as has been finely said, " like a grave
over the great art of the world."
In the seventeenth Velazquez and Vandyck alone sustain a dignity
inherited from the past. In Holland is a new school of artists, some of
whom strive to live with Nature and interpret her ways. From Rem
brandt comes a flash of genius. But among those who profess to carry
on the tradition of the older art, all, or nearly all, is swagger and senti
mentality. It was the seventeenth century which gave birth to science
and to reason, to the basis and to the methods of modern life and
thought. But like the stag in the fable, the century was least proud of
its chief merit. It gloried in its vanities and foibles. The attitude of
Urban VIII. and the Roman Curia towards Galileo, that of Charles II.
and his courtiers towards the Royal Society, are good instances of the
two chief points of view — a^ngidAntolerance and an jmiused_jcati_iescen-
sk»n — from which the great ones of the earth regarded all scientific
research. Of the vanities and foibles of the age, as of all the amenities of life,
Rome was still the centre-point in the seventeenth century. Neither
London nor Paris, even with the added splendour of Versailles, could vie
with the attractions of the Papal capital. Spon, who visited Rome in
1675, gives a description of it in which he extols all the attractions of
the place — the libraries where students could consult the rarest books; the
concerts in churches and in palaces ; the splendid collections of sculpture
and painting, ancient and modern ; the magnificent buildings of every age ;
villas covered with bas-reliefs and inscriptions ; the crowds of strangers
from all countries ; the gardens worthy of paradise, &c.
Rome, in fact, in the seventeenth century was the counterpart of
Paris in our own, the stage of Europe, the favourite abode of sovereigns
in exile (not so plentiful in those days as now), such as Christina of
Sweden, the rendezvous of all lovers of pleasure, the goal of every artist
the mart of all the elegances of life. It was from Rome that the
fashionable society of Europe borrowed its tone and its sentiment as it
got its gloves, soap, perfume and the cut of its clothes.
Such was the position which Rome occupied in the eyes of the world
Let us glance at the place. The task which Nicholas V had

CLAUDE LORRAIN 7
bequeathed to his successors of rebuilding and refortifying Rome had
been prosecuted with more or less zeal by the Popes of the fifteenth
century. Their energy was however chiefly expended on the great
Basilica of St. Peter's, and upon the fortifications. Towards the end of
that century, Sixtus V., taking a wider scope, set to work con furore to
embellish the city with new palaces, new bridges and new fountains.
Under this Pontiff and, in a somewhat less degree, under those who
succeeded him down to the end of the seventeenth century, Rome under
went a process of transformation similar, although less painful in its
results, to the transformation in our own day of Papal Rome into the
New Rome, the capital of United Italy.
The building mania which prevailed in Rome in the seventeenth
century seems to us incredible. It spared nothing. With all its vaunted
admiration for the remains of antiquity it did not hesitate to destroy or
despoil those remains, when by so doing it could raise some edifice to its
own greater glory for the time being. It has left us scarcely a single
scrap of Gothic architecture in Rome — -Gothic indeed being to the
refined taste of that day an utter barbarism. It entirely swept away every
vestige of mediaeval Rome, and set on the city that stamp of the barocco
which it preserved down to the last years of the Papal power. We must
realise the passion of that day for architecture to understand the
prominent position which architecture occupies in the pictures of the
period. All these new buildings offered an extensive field for the painter and
the sculptor, for every inch of them had to be adorned and decorated, the
taste of the age abhorring anything like an empty space and understanding
nothing of the dignity of repose. Painting had almost ceased to be an
art, to become a craft. The masters who were most esteemed were those
who could work the fastest, everybody, more particularly the Popes,
being in a great hurry to see their edifices completed. These masters were,
many of them at least, contractors rather than artists. They prepared
the designs, borrowing freely from their great predecessors and set their
assistants to work on them. Their assistants were a horde of hungry
painters who poured into Rome from all sides, attracted quite as much
by the desire of gain as by that of study, a worthless lot both as men and
artists if we may judge from the majority of their productions, and from

8 CLAUDE LORRAIN
an ill-natured anecdote told by Passeri about Agostino Tassi, the master
of Claude. Tassi's protector, Paul V., remarked in the hearing of some of
his courtiers that he held all painters in poor esteem, having been always
deceived by any of them with whom he had had to do, with the exception
of Tassi. The bystanders were surprised, not at the statement, but at the
exception, Tassi being notorious for his lies, his quarrels and his licentious
living. Asked for an explanation, the Pope replied that he had never
been deceived by Tassi for, from the first, he had believed him to be what
he afterwards proved that he was — an unreliable rascal !
With the change which came over the outward aspect of Rome there
came a change in the population.
The people who lived in these fastuous new palaces were no longer
of the same race that had graced the courts of the Medici and the
Farnese. Not indeed that the old Roman families were extinct.
The Colonna and the Orsini still stood at the head of the ancient
aristocracy, and, if their followers in these degenerate days only occasion
ally did a little stabbing in the streets under cover of the dark, the heads
of the two houses squabbled valiantly for precedence at court, each in
turn shutting himself up in a pet in his palace when the pas had been
granted to his rival.
Side by side however, with the old families new ones had sprung up.
Each successive Pontiff hastened to confer benefices and titles on a swarm
of kinsmen and countrymen. Sixtus V founded the system. His
successors improved on it. Thus a new aristocracy came to be formed.
It was thus that the Peretti, Aldobrandini, Borghesi, Ludovisi, Barberini
and others came by their wealth and position.
Each new Pope, it is true, generally endeavoured to make the relations
and creatures of his predecessors disgorge their ill-gotten gains. The
Popes however could not always carry things with a high hand • some
times they were obliged to temporise, the families in question having
taken root by their wealth or by intermarriage with the older aristocracy
for the real' noblesse did not disdain to give its daughters to these
nouveaux riches.
It was these nouveaux riches who were the great patrons of
They required to surround themselves with all the trappings of their rank'

Landscape with Figures. Dresden Gallery,
From a photogrnph by Messrs. Braun, Clement IS Cie. By permission

io CLAUDE LORRAIN
They stocked their palaces with marbles as they did their stables with
horses. A picture gallery was as much the appurtenance of a man of
quality as was a gorgeous coach. Admiration of Art meant the pride
of possession, not the worship of the beautiful.
Such were the prelates and the princes who bought Claude's Classic
landscapes with their elegant composition, their majestic trees and their
incidents borrowed from the Bible or from mythology. Can we wonder
if, painting under the shadow of these pretentious palaces, under the eye
of those Monsignori rustling in silk and lace and Latinity, Claude should
have allowed the artificial atmosphere of his age to mingle with that of
Nature ? Surely the marvel is not that he should have been somewhat
artificial, but that he should have been so natural as he was. The age
rather than- the artist was chiefly responsible for his shortcomings.

CHAPTER II
EARLY LIFE
Claude Gellee was born in the year 1600 at the hamlet of
Chamagne in the diocese of Toul, and the Duchy of Lorraine, whence he
acquired the name le Lorrain by which he is best known. In Claude's
day Chamagne was of more importance than in our own, thanks to the
neighbouring chateau, once a commanderie of the Knights Templars,
subsequently the seat of the seigneurs of Chamagne, whence the place
was sometimes called Chateau-Chamagne.
Of the chateau scarcely a trace now remains. The village numbers
about 650 souls. It lies close to the northern boundary of the modern
department of the Vosges.. The name of Gellee is not yet extinct. M.
Francois Gellee, now aged seventy, son of a former maire of Chamagne, is
a lineal descendant of one of the painter's brothers, and several other in
habitants of the place claim kinship with Claude. The house in which the
artist was born still exists, having been carefully preserved by the Gellee
family, in whose possession it remained until three years ago, and by the
Association des Artistes Lorrains, who then bought it with a view to
making of it a kind of museum of relics of the painter and copies of his

_S^^SS-I

^"'^ '/v c"tl?e to the Meadows. From the Etching by Claude.

12 CLAUDE LORRAIN
works. It stands at one end of the village street. Over the doorway is
a tablet of serpentine with the inscription
Ici est ne en 1600 Claude Gellee dit le Lorrain, mort a Rome le 23 Nov. 1682.
From the threshold the eye ranges westward over green pasture lands to
the meanderings of the Moselle, northward to the forest of Charmes.
Truly no unfitting birthplace for a painter, who all through life loved
majestic trees, and widespread waters !
Of the artist's parents, Jean Gellee and Anne Padose, we know no
thing, except that they were in humble circumstances and had a numerous
family, of whom five were sons, Jean, Dominique, Claude, Denis, and
Michel. The kingdom of art is like the kingdom of heaven in this
respect, that " a rich man shall hardly enter into it." Like nearly all
great artists, Claude, born poor, had to struggle for daily bread all
through his boyhood and early manhood.
The story of his life has been told with some differences by two of his
contemporaries. One of these is Joachim von Sandrart, a native of Frank
fort, who after studying etching and engraving, as a lad, under Peter
Isselburg in Nuremberg and painting under Girard Hornthorst in
Utrecht, betook himself, in company with the latter, to England. Here
he gained the good graces of the king and the Earl of Arundel, and
might have looked forward to a brilliant career. Alarmed however, by
the murder of the Duke of Buckingham and by the threatening aspect of
the political, horizon Sandrart quitted London in 1628, and after a tour
through Italy, took up his abode for five or six years in Rome, where his
work, both as a painter and engraver, seemed to have pleased the taste of
the day. In 1635 Sandrart returned to Germany, and finally settled
down in Nuremberg, where he wrote several books on Art, amongst them
the Teutche Academie der Edlen Bau-Bild- und Malerei Kiinste first in
German in 1675, t^xen m a Latin translation, Academia nobilissima Artis
Picture (1683).
This volume contains many interesting details about painters of
note whom the author had known, amongst others about Claude
whose intimate friend and companion Sandrart had been in Rome
The other biographer is Filippo Baldinucci, a Florentine artist, who,

CLAUDE LORRAIN

i3

in his Notizie de' Professori del Disegno, published from 1684 to 1728,
has left us an account of Claude's life and works.
Baldinucci appears to have known Claude in his old age — he tells
us that Claude showed him the Liber Veritatis — but his information
was chiefly derived from Jean and Joseph Gellee, nephews of the artist.
On these two accounts all subsequent biographies of Claude have been

Portrait of Claude.
From Sandrart's " Academia Nobilissimar Artis Picture." Nuremberg, 1683.

based. To them must be added such details about the artist's cha
racter and financial position as may be gathered from his will, dated
1663, and a codicil of 1670, documents discovered by Signor Bertolotti
in the Roman archives, the result of a research instituted by Lady Dilke
in 1881. According to Sandrart, Claude was a dull boy, a very dull boy —
scientia valde mediocri — and learned little or nothing at school — parum,

H CLAUDE LORRAIN
imo nihil fere, proficeret. The statement is borne out by such scraps of
writing as Claude in later years scrawled on the backs of his drawings.
In these short notes he jumbles up French, Italian and Latin ; he spells
his own name in half a dozen different ways, so much so that in his will
he has to record the correct spelling of it as Gellee, and in his attempt
to spell other people's names, even those of his best friends, he goes
hopelessly astray.
Seeing that there was nothing to be made of the boy as a scholar,
his parents apprenticed him to a pastrycook — pictori quodam arteocratum,
runs the Latin — pictori being evidently a misprint for pistori. Later
Claude set off with some of his countrymen for Rome, " whither," so
Sandrart informs us, " the cooks and piemakers of Lorraine had for
centuries been accustomed to repair."
Thus far Sandrart. Baldinucci's narrative differs. Claude, he tells
us, had lost both his parents by the time he was twelve years old, and
was obliged to cross the Rhine and seek a home under the roof of his
eldest brother, Jean, who had set up at Freiburg as a wood-engraver
and carver. Here Claude remained twelve months, receiving instruction
from his brother in the elements of drawing. At the end of that time
a relative, a dealer in lace, the production of which was then, as it is
now, an important industry in the neighbourhood of Claude's native
place, passing through Freiburg, on his way to Rome with his wares,
offered to take the boy with him. In Rome Claude found a lodging
near the Pantheon, and continued his studies as best he could, apparently
unaided. His relative, the lace merchant, having returned to the north,
the lad was left to eke out existence on the scantiest means. From
time to time his relations sent him small remittances, but the outbreak
of the Thirty Years' War, and the consequent difficulty of transmitting
/money, soon deprived him even of these.
Thrown entirely on his own resources, Claude made his way to
'Naples, attracted thither, it would appear, by the reputation of a German
landscape painter, Gottfried Waels.
Of Waels we know little. He had come to Italy some years
previously — apparently from Cologne — and, after studying in Rome
under Tassi, had established himself at Naples. His work, small land
scapes in the elaborate style of Elsheimer, is now very scarce.

CLAUDE LORRAIN 15
Claude remained two years in Naples, studying architecture, per
spective and colour under this master. Then he returned to Rome,
where he was admitted into the household of Agostino Tassi, from
whom he received board, lodging, and " instruction in the best principles
of art," in return for his services as stable-boy, colour grinder, and
general " slavey." Such is Baldinucci's account. It agrees in the main
with that of Sandrart. With regard to the chief discrepancy, viz. as to
Claude's apprenticeship to a pastrycook, it has been suggested that Jean
and Joseph Gellee, who furnished Baldinucci with the account of their
illustrious relative, were led by considerations of their own social dignity
to give a more genteel version of Claude's boyhood. The only point of
real importance, in which the two accounts do not tally, is as to the
instruction from Waels.
Of this Sandrart says nothing. Baldinucci places it before Claude's
entry into Tassi's household. We know that Claude was with Tassi as
early as 16 19 from a deposition made by the latter at that date and
discovered some years ago by M. Eugene Muntz in the criminal archives
of Rome. In this document Tassi mentions " Claudio di Lorena " as
having been one of his assistants — the others are Carlo Borgognone,
Bartolomeo fiamengho and a certain Martin Gomassin — in some work at
Bagnaia (a little town near Viterbo) for the Cardinal Montalto, a work
which occupied the painter two years and a half.
As the principal master of Claude, Tassi deserves some mention.
Born at Perugia, in 1566, Agostino Buonamici, surnamed Tassi, repaired
as a youth to Rome, where he studied under Paul Bril, one of the many
Dutch painters who settled in Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and one of the first artists who painted landscape pure and
simple. Tassi, if we may trust Passeri's account, was all through his
life a vain, hot-headed scamp. In Florence, whither he had gone in the
hope of winning the Grand Duke Cosimo's favour, he was implicated in
a serious street riot and relegated for ten years to the galleys at Leghorn.
Subsequently he worked under the Salimbeni and the Gentileschi at
Genoa. Then he returned to Rome, where he worked for Pope Paul V.
and became celebrated for his clever perspective, his ornamental designs
and his marines — storms being his speciality. Of his work, now very
rare, a few specimens may be seen in Florence and Rome. In his latter

i6 CLAUDE LORRAIN
years Tassi — teste Sandrart — suffered a good deal from the gout, but
despite this, he seems to have been a good-natured man, and to have
taken a kindly interest in his starveling pupil.
How long Claude remained under Tassi's roof Sandrart does not tell
us. Baldinucci states that he left Rome in April, 1625, and began a
series of wanderings, which lasted over two years. His first stage was
the Santa Casa of Loretto. Thence he went to Venice ; then through
Bavaria to his native village in Lorraine.
This short account given by Baldinucci of Claude's journey has been
amplified by later biographers and adorned with picturesque details.
The painter is said to have remained some time in Venice and to have
painted several pictures there. Of these no trace remains.
Venice however, then in the autumn of her splendour, could not fail
to make a deep and lasting impression on a mind like Claude's. The
seaports lined with stately quays and marble palaces, which all through his
life Claude loved best to paint and painted best, were doubtless reminis
cences of that early visit to Venice.
The majestic scenery of the Tyrol, on the contrary, does not appear
to have struck his imagination. The terrible and the grandiose side of
Nature had no attraction for his brush. He left such themes to Poussin
and Salvator Rosa.
Some of Claude's biographers, notably Knight Payne, would have us
believe that the young painter spent some time at Harlaching, a little
village near Munich.
To commemorate this supposed sojourn of Claude at Harlaching
a monument, bearing his portrait and an inscription, was erected in
1865 by King Ludwig I. of Bavaria.
Various other incidents related by d'Argenville — e.g., an illness that,
towards the end of his journey, laid Claude low, in which condition he
was robbed of all he possessed — may be dismissed as apocryphal.
From Chamagne Claude repaired to Nancy, the capital of Lorraine
and seat of the Ducal Court, a court famous for its love of luxury and
its patronage of the arts.
Through a relative who resided there, Claude was fortunate enough
to secure an introduction to Claude Deruet — Dervent in Baldinucci's
text— painter-in-ordinary to the reigning Duke, Henri II. , a favourite

-*3

n.

b.

1 8 CLAUDE LORRAIN
of the Prince de Phalsbourg (a bastard of the House of Guise), and
all-powerful in the art world of Lorraine. Deruet was a painter of
considerable capacity ; M. Meaume indeed esteems him one of the best
artists of Lorraine. Born in 1588 — at Nancy it is supposed — he went
to Rome as a lad, and studied there under Antonio Tempesta and the
Cavalier d'Arpino. Returning to Nancy, Deruet painted portraits and
decorative designs. His work attracted attention outside Lorraine.
Louis XIII. took lessons in painting from him not without profit, to
judge from a portrait in gouache of the painter by the king, which
is treasured in the manuscript department of the Musee Lorrain at
Nancy. Deruet, whose position — he had received letters of nobility in 1621
— enabled him to play the grand seigneur, received the young stranger
graciously, and consented to employ him as one of his assistants.
Shortly after Claude's arrival at Nancy, Deruet was called on by the
Prince de Phalsbourg and the Prior of a Carmelite Monastery, erected
at the beginning of the century by the grand-nephew of Calvin, to
ornament the roof of the newly-built church of the community. On
this task Claude was set to work along with Deruet's other assistants.
Unfortunately this church and its contents were destroyed during the
French Revolution,
Claude's share in the work was, according to Baldinucci, restricted
to the architectural ornaments, a kind of work which was the more
tedious and distasteful to him, that he had entered Deruet's service
on the understanding that he was to be employed in figure-painting.
While he was in this frame of mind, an accident which happened to
a gilder, who was working side by side with him on the scaffolding,
caused the young painter to throw up the uncongenial task. The
man, missing his footing, slipped and fell. Fortunately a projecting
beam arrested him in his descent. Claude, with considerable courage
and presence of mind, managed to rescue him in the nick of time.
"This accident, however," says Baldinucci, "had such an effect on
our painter that he entirely gave up this sort of work, and ever after
wards had great reluctance in accepting any chance of working which
obliged him to paint on a scaffold, although several times in after-life
he made an exception to the rule."

CLAUDE LORRAIN

l9

We may conjecture that other feelings mingled with that of disgust
at the task on which he was employed to induce Claude to the decision
which he now took.
The barbarians who poured into Italy in the third and following
centuries pretended that none who had once eaten figs could free
themselves from the longing to see Italy again. Claude was in a like
case. Having tasted the joys of life under a southern sky, he could
with difficulty accustom himself to northern lands. His fancies flew
back to the sunburnt Campagna and the rippling bays of the Medi
terranean. Following them, he set his face southward and made his
way towards Italy, choosing this time the most rapid route — i.e., by
Lyons to Marseilles. Here, while waiting for a ship to take him to

Old Port of Marseilles, From a Pen drawing by Clauae.

Italy — so at least his later biographers relate — he was stricken by an
attack of fever, which well-nigh proved fatal. On his recovery he found <?
that he had been robbed of nearly all he possessed.
F'orced to cast about for the means to continue his journey, he had
the good luck to find a patron in a wealthy Marseillais merchant, who
commissioned him to paint two pictures and was so satisfied with them
that he would gladly have had more. The young artist, however, was
in too great a hurry to regain the classic shore of Italy to allow himself
to be any longer detained, and, having earned wherewithal to pay his
passage, embarked on a ship bound for Civita Vecchia. On board he
found congenial company in the person of Charles Errard of Nantes, who
through the influence of Marie de Medicis had become court-painter to
B 2

20 CLAUDE LORRAIN
Louis XIII. Errard was now on his way to Rome with his two sons r
who intended to complete their art education there.
After a voyage beset with dangers and discomfort, owing to a
succession of storms, the travellers reached Civita Vecchia.
At last on St. Luke's Day, 1627, after an absence of two years,
Claude again set foot within the walls of Rome.
To read the account of his life given by Baldinucci, one would be
tempted to believe that Claude at once sprang into notice, and sold his
works to wealthy patrons both Italian and foreign. Sandrart however,
who arrived about this time in Rome and made Claude's acquaintance
there, gives us an account from which we gather that the next few years
of Claude's life were years of constant study, and that the results of this
study, though in the end they brought both fame and riches, were at first
of small pecuniary profit to the painter (primitus mimimi testimata).
" Claude " — it is Sandrart who speaks — " was indefatigable in his
endeavour to get a real solid basis of art training, to penetrate into the
inmost secrets of nature." Day after day he would be up before dawn and
far out into the Campagna. Heedless of fatigue, he would stay there till
after nightfall, noting every phase of dawn, straining to seize the tints
of sunrise, sunset and the gloaming hours, tints which he would endeavour
to match with his colours on his palette. Then in his studio or garret
he would set to work with the palette thus prepared, and endeavour to
produce a transcript of the effects which he had seen, and which he suc
ceeded in rendering "with a veracity which no painter before him had
ever obtained."
Sandrart too was a great lover and serious student of nature.
Claude came upon him one day — perhaps this was their first meeting
and the beginning of their friendship — near the falls of Tivoli. Sand
rart was drawing and painting from nature. He lays some little em
phasis on this method, as if it were something quite unusual, something
of his own particular invention. In another passage of his book he
speaks of this method as quite the best and as being — to quote his own
1 There appears to be some discrepancy here in Baldinucci's account. The young
Charles Errard made two journeys to Rome, the first in which he was accompanied by
his father and brother in 162 1, the second, which must be the one alluded to here, some
vears later. On this second journey, however, he was, it seems, alone.— Cf. Claude
Lorrain, Mrs. Mark Pattison (Lady Dilke).

CLAUDE LORRAIN

21

words — " the union of body and soul." Claude adopted this method,
gathered fresh courage from it and worked on " with untiring industry
and pertinacity."
After this first chance meeting in the open, the two friends spent
many a sunny day together at Tivoli, Frascati, Subiaco and S. Benedetto,
" making studies of mountains, caves, valleys, the terrible falls, the
temple of the Sibyl and such like," or in the gardens of Sandrart's
patron Giustiniani drawing trees and flowers. Perhaps the very dis-

Tivoli. From a Sketch in the British Museum.

similarity of their tastes and aims made them the closer friends. Sand
rart went to nature for accessories to his historical compositions, and made
studies, apparently on a large scale, of " curious rocks, strange trunks
of trees, the most leafy boughs, waterfalls, buildings, and big ruins," 1
while Claude preferred such views as disclosed a wide horizon. Some
times the two friends would exchange canvases.
1 Sandrart, Academia.

22 CLAUDE LORRAIN
Thus it was that Claude eventually succeeded in producing those
landscapes which the connoisseurs of his day sought so eagerly and
paid so highly, " giving for them," says Sandrart, " a hundred gold crowns
and even more." Before those golden days arrived, however, there was .
an interval when the young artist was forced to undertake less congenial
work. It was probably at this time that Claude, setting aside his nervous
dislike to working on a scaffold, executed some frescoes of which Baldi-
nucci speaks, in the palace of Cardinal Crescenzio in the Piazza of the
Pantheon, in that of the Muti family in the Piazza de' Santi Apostoli,
and in a large house (Casone) belonging to the same family on the
Trinita de' Monti. Of the second of these works Sandrart has left us
a minute description. The room, it appears, was a lofty one. On the
first wall the painter had represented a palace and a forest, on the second
a plain "with mountains and waterfalls, travellers and animals, and
the third a seaport with ships, on the fourth caves, ruins, fragments
of statues " with certain wild beasts." The German extols the realistic
rendering of the trees " which seemed to be rustling under the breath
of the wind," the delicate differentiation of the various planes, the
skilful transition from one landscape to another, and concludes his
somewhat verbose panegyric by saying that any " connoisseur can judge
from this work that our Claude attained the height of renown in painting
landscape." The fashion of frescoing apartments with landscape subjects was
not entirely a novelty at that date. It had come into fashion at Rome
in the sixteenth century. Claude seems to have carried the style to
perfection. We can well imagine how the taste of his day would applaud
such trompe ceVil effects as Sandrart mentions.
To the seventeenth century it must have seemed almost as great a
work of genius to turn a room into an imitation forest, as to plant an
alley of trees, lop their lower parts into the semblance of a wall and the
upper into arches, or to prune a yew-hedge into the form of a peacock or
a pyramid !
The Muti-Papazurri palace still exists. It stands at the corner
of the Piazza SS. Apostoli and the Piazza Pilota. Since Claude's day
it has changed its owners and its name more than once (it is now known

Sketch from Nature. British Museum.

24 CLAUDE LORRAIN
as Palazzo Balestra), and sheltered more than one figure of history and
romance. The tourist glances at it with curiosity as having been the
residence of the last of the Stuarts and of the beautiful young Countess
Savorelli the " Tolla" of Edmund About's novel.
Lady Dilke was the first to call attention to the existence in this
palace of a frescoed room. This room is on the ground floor. It is a
long narrow gallery with three windows on each side and a lofty vaulted
roof. The walls and the ceiling are frescoed, the latter with cupids and
mythological subjects, the former with castles, ruins, trees and stretches
of water. Notwithstanding the fact that these frescoes tally only in a
very vague fashion with Sandrart's description of his friend's work, and
despite a tradition which ascribes them to Poussin and his pupils, it is
not impossible that they may be the remains of Claude's work, renovated
from time to time by the house painter !
When not engaged in studying in the open air or painting frescoes
for his livelihood, Claude would spend his time drawing from the life or
from statues at the Academy. In this pursuit he persevered diligently,
even to his latest years. His application, so far from being profitable to
him, was noxious. The fact is that Claude did possess a certain facility
for indicating figures, as is shown by many of his drawings. When
however he set himself to elaborate these sketches, to put in all the
muscles which the Academic teaching of the day insisted upon, he produced
very painful results. In his pictures this defect asserts itself even more
plainly. The figures are nearly always painted with all the conscientious
ness of incapacity, and with a heavy touch which is entirely out of har
mony with the treatment of the rest of the canvas ; the atmosphere which
envelops the landscape seems, as it approaches the figures, to become
suddenly exhausted, sometimes the sun forbears to cast a shadow !
Of his weakness in this branch of art the painter was fully conscious.
He used to say that he sold the landscape but gave the figures. This
modest speech contradicts the story attached to a large picture now
in Grosvenor House, The Israelites Adoring the Golden Calf (L. V 129).
Tradition says that this picture was painted for Sir Peter Lely, who
particularly requested that the figures might be left for him to paint
himself. Claude filled the composition with elaborate groups of figures
over which he appears to have spent much time and trouble, to judge

CLAUDE LORRAIN 25
from the numerous drawings of the subject which have come down to us,
with a result which is certainly far from satisfactory. The picture
was sent, it is said, with a message to the effect that Lely might take it
or leave it.
Following a custom common in his century, Claude had frequently
recourse to other artists for the execution of the figures in his pictures,
but he always himself carefully indicated their movements and their place
in the composition.
Among the painters from whom he derived assistance in this branch
were Francesco Allegrini, Filippo Lauri, Jan Miels, and one, perhaps
both, of the brothers Courtois, Jacques, called " il Borgonone " and
celebrated as a battle-painter, Guillaume, the younger and less
known. It was however in his middle and later periods that Claude had
recourse to these collaborators ; in his earlier works the figures are
nearly always his own, occasionally by Allegrini.
Etching — as we shall see — must have occupied a considerable portion
of Claude's time in his earlier years.
A hard worker, both from love of his art and from the necessity ot j
gaining his daily bread, the young Lorrain had little leisure or inclination
to mingle in society. With the exception of Sandrart, he does not
appear to have had any intimate friends among the cosmopolitan colony
of artists in Rome. The most prominent French painter then residing
at Rome was Nicolas Poussin, an artist with the general bent of whose
genius Claude must have had much sympathy. The character of the two
men however was entirely different — Claude, a rustic by birth and
breeding, illiterate, simple ; Poussin, an aristocrat, a scholar, a would-be-
philosopher, not to say a pedant. It would only have been by the law of
contraries that these two men could have been friends. We need not
therefore be surprised to find no mention of Claude in Poussin's letters.
That the two artists were acquainted we know from a passage in the
Academia, where Sandrart says that he, Francois du Quesnoy, Claude,. and
Nicolas Poussin sometimes met to discuss questions of art ; in another
Sandrart speaks of a sketching expedition to Tivoli, in which Claude,
Poussin, and some others took part.
"Absorbed in his work, Claude," says de Piles, "never visited any

26 CLAUDE LORRAIN
one." " Of a kind and sincere nature," says Sandrart, " he sought no
other pleasure than that which came to him from his art."
Apart from the intrigue for patronage] apart from the drinking and
brawling in taverns in which — teste the Roman police records (a fruitful
source of information about the artists of that day) — so many of his
contemporaries passed a large portion of their lives, Claude led a serene,
secluded existence, his days measured by the uprising and the setting of
the sun, his soul wrapped in the contemplation of nature, his heart
in his work.
When Fame at last came, it would seem as if she had rather courted*';
Claude than Claude her.

CHAPTER III
SUCCESS
How and when Fame first came to Claude we cannot exactly deter
mine. From Sandrart's account it would seem that before he left Rome
(1635) Claude's reputation was firmly established. Thus Sandrart tells us
that, among the studies which he received from Claude in exchange for'
some of his own, was an early morning effect of peculiar merit. This
the shrewd German sold to a Dutchman for five hundred florins. Another'
anecdote points to the same conclusion. Sebastian Bourdon, a French
painter remarkable for his wandering and adventurous career arrived in
Rome about 1634. Bourdon possessed a remarkable facility for copying
the style of other artists, a facility by which he profited in his early
days in Rome to procure a livelihood. Having seen in Claude's studio
a half-finished landscape, on which the artist had been engaged for a
fortnight, Bourdon set to work, and in eight days produced a finished
copy of it, executed with such maestria that it was hailed by the con
noisseurs of Rome as a masterpiece of Claude. Guillet de St. Georges,
who tells the. story, adds that Claude had the curiosity to go and see the
forgery, and was so enraged at it that he would have taken a summary
vengeance, had not Bourdon discreetly kept out of his way. Bourdon

Si

«l

fe°

¦^

28 CLAUDE LORRAIN
would scarcely have been at the trouble of counterfeiting the work of a
man who had not already won a reputation.
We also know that before Sandrart left Rome Claude had sent for a
nephew, Jean Gellee, to whom he intrusted the whole management of his
household, even the purchase of his colours, in order to have his time
quite free.
From all this we may gather that before 1635 Claude had an estab
lished reputation and clientele.
One of Claude's earliest patrons would seem to have been Philippe
de Bethune, Comte de Selles et de Charost, who in 1627 was for the
second time appointed ambassador of France at the Papal Court.
This nobleman, a younger brother of the great Sully, added to his
reputation as a soldier and a diplomat that of a connoisseur of art.
During his residence in Rome he formed a collection of pictures by Italian
masters. For him Claude painted two fine ca'nvases now in the Louvre, one
(Louvre Cat. 310, L. V. 9) representing a seaport with a classic arch and
a long vista of marble palaces, bathed in the golden light of the westering ;|
sun, the other (Louvre Cat. 311, L.V 10) a view ofthe Campo Vaccino
or Forum, as it was in that day — very different from what the excavations
of the last twenty-five vears have rendered it.
A replica of the latter picture but of inferior merit— possibly by
some pupil of Claude's — hangs in the Dulwich Gallery. There is an
etching by Claude of the same subject bearing in its first date, the date
1636, which may serve as an indication of the approximate date of the
picture. It was apparently about this time that Claude came under the notice
and the protection of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, one of the most
distinguished prelates of the Roman Court, and one of the ablest
diplomatists of the day.
The Cardinal had been Papal Nuncio in Flanders during the wars,
and subsequently at the Court of France. As the result of the former
mission he published a work entitled History of the War in Flanders,
which went through several editions in the original Italian, was translated
into English, French, and Spanish, and earned for its author a European
reputation as a man of letters. From the latter mission he returned
having won high favour with Louis XIII., and received the title of

Cardinal Bentivoglio, by Van Dyck. Pitti Gallery.
From a photograph by G. Brogi. By permission.

3o CLAUDE LORRAIN
" Protector of France " at the Papal Court. He lives for us still,
" an Italian of the type produced by the counter-Reformation " 1 in the
noble portrait, familiar to all visitors to the Pitti, which Vandyck, who
was his guest in Rome from 1622 to 1624, painted of him, and in the
memoirs which he himself has left us. Unfortunately these memoirs
were only carried down to the beginning of the seventeenth century. We
are thus deprived of the interesting details which the Cardinal might
have given us about the artists and litterati whom, in later life, he
befriended. For this influential patron Claude painted two landscapes.
This commission proved the turning-point in the artist's career. The
Cardinal, who was an old and intimate friend of the then Pope
Urban VIIL, brought these works under the notice of the Pontiff, and
aroused his interest in the young painter.
Urban VIIL, Maffei Barberini, scion of a great Florentine family
enriched by commerce in Ancona, is distinguished in the history of the
Papacy mainly for his zeal in fortifying his dominions. " My pre
decessors " — he is said to have exclaimed — " built monuments of marble,
mine shall be of iron." True to this boast he set to work to raise or
strengthen fortifications. He has left his mark all over the States of
the Church, where the bees emblazoned on his coat of arms occur
almost as frequently as the palle of the Medicean Popes. He esta
blished a factory of arms at Tivoli, stocked the cellars of the Vatican
with muskets and ammunition ; enlarged and embellished the port
of Civita Vecchia. To the energy of a soldier Urban VIII. added
considerable merit as a scholar. He was a good Latinist, and loved to
set the subjects of the New and Old Testaments to Sapphic and Alcaic
measures. His knowledge of Greek won him the flattering epithet of
" the Attic bee."
Such was Claude's new patron. FYom him the artist received at
their first interview a commission for four pictures. Two of these,
formerly part of the collection of Louis XIV. are now in the Louvre.
The one (Louvre Cat. 313, L.V. 14) sometimes known as The Ancient
Port of Messina, sometimes as The Conibatants, from a group of figures
struggling in the foreground, represents a harbour with the usual per
spective of porticoes and palaces, amongst which appears the Villa Medici
1 J. A. Symonds. Renaissance in Italy. " Revival of Learning," p. 27.

CLAUDE LORRAIN 31
(the French Academy of Rome). The whole canvas is illuminated
with a ruddy glow of light from the golden orb about to dip below
the horizon. Here and there the colour has gone in patches, but not
sufficiently to mar the fine general effect.
The other Louvre picture (Louvre Cat. 312, L. V. 13) repre-)
sents a pastoral scene, and is generally known as The Village Dance. .
Under the shade of a lofty gnarled tree some peasants are gathered
with their cattle and their dogs. One couple dances to the music of
bagpipes, flute, and tambourine. A hunting party has chanced that
way. One of the gallants advances, leading forward a village girl to
join in the dance. His companions look on. These figures have been
attributed to Jan Miels, but M. Emile Michel has pointed out that
the execution is quite different to that artist's ordinary work. More
over, from the fact that this group of figures appears with some slight
changes in more than one of Claude's etchings, M. Michel argues that
they are more probably Claude's own work. The same critic sees in
the landscape a reminiscence of Lorraine. There is certainly nothing
peculiarly Italian in the vegetation of the foreground, in the bridge
and hamlet which form the middle distance, in the broad sweep of
silvery waters bounded by mountains faintly visible through a golden
haze. The spot is an Arcady of the artist's own imagination. It is
quite possible that in painting it Claude may have had in his mind's
eye some of the scenes of his boyhood, some souvenir of truant days
in the green meadows watered by the many-branched meanderings of
the Moselle near his native hamlet. Both these pictures bear the
inscription "claudio inv. romae 1639." They are the painter's
earliest dated works in oil. The other two pictures of the set painted
for Pope Urban were a view of Castel Gandolfo {L.V. 35) and the
Port of Marinella (L. V. 46). The former of these, a small picture
painted on panel, still hangs in the Barberini collection ; the latter
cannot be traced.
When the Pope showed the example, the Cardinals and Monsignori
of his court hastened to follow it. Among the great prelates who
patronised Claude in the earlier part of his life were Cardinal Rospigliosi|
(afterwards Pope under the name of Clement IX.), Cardinal Medici,l
Cardinal Faustus Poli, Prefect of the Vatican, Cardinal Angelo Giorio, |

32 CLAUDE LORRAIN
formerly tutor to the Pope's nephews. For the last-named prelate
Claude painted no less than seven canvases, three landscapes, three
seaports, and a figure-subject. Of this set of pictures one, the earliest,
bearing the date 1644, hangs in the National Gallery (5, L. V 43).
It represents a seaport at sunset. It is not fair to judge of this canvas
in its present state. Many of the pigments seem to have changed.
The general tone is a disagreeable foxy red. Two others are now in
the Louvre. One of these, dated 1647, represents Samuel Anointing
David King of Israel (Louvre Cat. 315, L.V 69). The figures are
grouped under a Doric portico, an inaccuracy to which Claude's patrons
were probably as indifferent as was he himself. This picture, too,
has suffered from time and injudicious treatment. Nevertheless in the
suffused golden light which pervades the whole canvas and in the'
delicate values of the middle distance it is a fine work. The other
picture, representing The Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsus (Louvre Cat.
314, L. V. 63), is in excellent preservation, and is esteemed one of the
finest of Claude's seaports. The Queen, whose treasure-laden galleys
are moored close in shore, has stepped out of a richly caparisoned*
boat on to a quay strewn with fragments of sculpture. Leaning on
the arm of a negro and followed by her handmaidens, she advances
to meet Mark Antony, who comes forward from a lofty palace portal
with attendant pages. The figures are not fortunate. Indeed, they
look" like what they are — men and women of the seventeenth century
playing in a classical charade. But for us the interest of the picture
lies not,§in the- personages nor in the stately palaces ofthe most approved
classic architecture, overshadowed by spreading trees, but in the cloud-
flecked sky, iridescent with the light of a sun new risen and still partially
) veiled by the morning mist, in the blue waters — barred with a streak
fof silver light — whose wavelets come lapping up against the galleys
and the marble quays.
Claude's reputation was not limited to Rome. Orders soon began to,
come to him from beyond the Alps. As early as 1 644 we find him
painting a picture for England, the exquisite little landscape, introducing
the fable of Echo and Narcissus, which now hangs in the National
Gallery. Many of his works at this period were executed, as the Liber
Veritatis shows, pour Paris, or for French patrons. Amongst them was

The Village Dance. Louvre.
From a photograph by Braun, Clement y Cie.

By permission.

34 CLAUDE LORRAIN
M. Passart, the maitre des comptes, who was also the patron of Nicolas
Poussin. For this amateur Claude painted two fine landscapes, one
(!,. V. 79) now in the museum at Grenoble, the other (L. V. 89) at
Windsor. Both represent views of Tivoli, and are remarkable as being
direct renderings of actual scenes rather than classical compositions.
These French commissions were doubtless due in part to the recom
mendations of M. de Bethune, but it would seem that Claude was in a
certain measure indebted to a young fellow-countryman, Jean Nocret.
This artist, a native of Nancy, went to Italy to finish his art studies and
was employed in Rome from 1643 to 1644 in making copies for M. de
Chantelou, the patron of Nicolas Poussin. We find Nocret in the follow
ing year settled in Paris with an appointment at court and in enjoyment
of the royal patronage. A few years later Claude sent him a little land
scape (L. V. 97) with figures of St. John and two angels in the fore
ground, now in the possession of Lord Methuen. It is painted on copper
and bears the following inscription : —
'" A Monsieur Nocre paintre [du roy\ a Paris faict par moy Claude Gellee lorain lano 1647
Roma pour le faveur que lay recent!'
In 1644 Claude lost his two most influential patrons, Cardinal
Bentivoglio and Urban VIIL, who died within a few months of each
other-. The conclave held in the same year resulted in the election of
Cardinal Giambattista Pamfili, who now assumed the tiara under the
title of Innocent X. The new Pope, although partly indebted to the
Barberini faction for his election, held political views entirely opposed to
those of his predecessor. Under Urban French influence had been pre
dominant, under Innocent Spain and the house of Austria regained their
former ascendency. The members of the Barberini family, accused of
having perverted justice, appropriated benefices, embezzled public money,
were driven, one after another, to seek refuge beyond the Alps. Their
palaces Were seized, their offices bestowed on others, their revenues
confiscated. These changes do not appear to have affected Claude prejudicially.
On the contrary he gained by them a new patron in the person of the
Pope's nephew, Prince Camillo Pamfili, son of the notorious Donna
Olympia Maidalchina, the widowed sister-in-law of the Pontiff. Camillo
had been made a cardinal by his uncle, but threw aside the purple to

CLAUDE LORRAIN 35
marry the beautiful Olympia Aldobrandina, the richest heiress in Rome.
For Camillo statecraft had no attractions. Leaving his wife and mother
to struggle for supremacy, he devoted himself to a life of pleasure and
to the collection of works of art. For him Claude painted, as the
Liber Veritatis records, four pictures (Z,. V. 92, 107, 113, 119). Three
of these, a landscape with Mercury Stealing the Cattle of Admetus, The
Mill, and The Temple of Apollo at Delos — -the two latter perhaps Claude's
most celebrated pictures — still form part of the Doria collection at Rome.
The fourth picture of this set, The Ford, is in the National Gallery at
Pesth. Claude found another new patron at the Papal Court about this
time — the Due de Bouillon. This nobleman, a Huguenot by birth,
and elder brother of the great Turenne, had inherited the brilliant
military capacity, the turbulent disposition and passion for intrigue which
distinguished his father. A sworn enemy of Richelieu, he was implicated
in the conspiracy of Cinq Mars, arrested and thrown into prison. Thanks
to the stratagem of his courageous wife, who seized Sedan and threatened
to hand it over to the Spaniards if her husband was not at once set
free, he obtained his release. Feeling that his life was in danger in
France, he sought refuge at Rome. There, with the same nonchalance
with which his father had become a Protestant, the Duke changed his
creed, and was appointed commander-in-chief of the Papal forces. For
him Claude painted a replica, with some variations, of The Mill, or,
as it is otherwise called, the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, and another
picture, a seaport, entitled The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.
Both canvases bear inscriptions with the date 1648. These two cele
brated pictures, generally known as the " Bouillon Claudes," were taken
to Paris by the Duke, when, having patched up a peace — not, however,
of long duration — with the King and Mazarin, he returned to France.
They hung in the Hotel de Bouillon on the Quai Malaquais till the
French Revolution. They were then brought to England, and became
part of the Angerstein collection, the nucleus of our National Gallery.
Of them more anon.
Another French personage of high standing, who in this same year,
1648, patronised Claude, was the Due de Liancourt, the husband of
Jeanne de Schomberg, famous for her talents and her virtues. c 2

3 6 CLAUDE LORRAIN
The Duke, if he was far from sharing all the virtues of his wife was
like her a great lover of art, indeed so strong was his passion for pictures
that on one occasion, when his wife lay at death's door, he vowed that, if
she recovered, he would sell 50,000 francs worth of his pictures — the
greatest sacrifice he could make — and give the money to the poor.
Two pictures, The Ford and Ulysses restoring Chryseis to her Father,
which Claude painted for the Due de Liancourt and now in the Louvre.
The former has been ruined by the restorer, the latter is still, despite the
influence of time, a fine canvas. To both there clings a sentimental
interest from the fact that they once adorned the walls of the beautiful
Chateau of Liancourt, famous as the rendezvous of the noblest spirits of
that day, now utterly swept away.
About this time the artist was also working for a German potentate
who figures at one time as " Verdummisne principe todesche," at another
as " lis Verdummille todesseche," names which have baffled interpretation.
Claude had now achieved a world-wide celebrity.
The crowning honour came to him in a commission from Philip IV.
of Spain. It is possible that the attention of this great patron of the
arts may have been directed to Claude by the Marquis de Castel-Rodrigo,
the Spanish ambassador in Rome. We know that in 1637 Claude
etched a series of plates illustrative of the fetes given by this personage to
celebrate the accession of the Emperor Ferdinand III. More probably,
as has been surmised, Velazquez was the intermediary. The great Spanish
painter had been sent to Italy in 1 649 with a roving commission to purchase
works of art for his royal patron. He passed several months of the
following year in Rome, where he painted some portraits — notably that,
now in the Doria Palace, of Innocent X., perhaps the most brilliant
production of his brush — and was elected a member of the Academy of
St. Luke. The order consisted according to Baldinucci of eight works, four
subjects from the Old Testament, four from the New. All these, with
the addition of two from the collection of Philip V., are now in the
Prado. Time and the climate of Madrid have wrought havoc with
several of the number. Those which have escaped unharmed show
Claude at his best. Four of the set affect a shape unusual with the
artist, being upright compositions, i.e. greater in height than in width.

3 8 CLAUDE LORRAIN
These are A View near the Forum with the Burial of Sta. Sabina ( L. V. 48 J
— the figures attributed to Lauri, — a landscape with The Finding of
Moses (L. V. 47) and another with Tobit and the Archangel (L. V. 50),
the figures in both apparently by Courtois,— the fourth A Seaport,
with the Embarkation of St. Paula. Of the last three replicas were
executed by Claude himself, and are now in the collections of the Duke
of Wellington, of Lord Portarlington, and in the Dulwich Gallery.
The other four pictures of the Spanish commission are a landscape,
The Ford, a moonlight scene with ruins and a figure of St. Anthony
tempted by the devil, a wild and rugged desert with a figure of a
hermit praying, and a wooded landscape with waterfalls and a Magdalen
kneeling before a cross.
It was about the time of this commission, according to Baldinucci,
that Claude, annoyed by the constant forgeries of his work, determined
to form an album containing sketches of all works produced by him.
Baldinucci calls this book the Libro d1 Invenzioni or Libro di Verita.
In England it is better known by the Latin title Liber Veritatis.
Of this work we shall have occasion to speak at length in another
place. The next personage of importance for whom Claude worked was
the son of the Comte de Brienne, Secretary of State to Louis XIII,
Henri Louis de Lomenie, one of the motliest spirits of his century and
a fervent lover of poetry and art. It was for this young nobleman — or
perhaps through him for Louis XIII. — that Claude painted the two
curious little oval pictures now in the Louvre representing the siege
of L,a Rochelle and the forcing of the pass of Susa, the figures in which
are attributed to one of the brothers Courtois, probably Jacques. The
former picture bears the inscription "Claude in Roma 1651." Both
are painted on copper plated with silver, a new invention about that
time, and one which, it appears, interested de Lomenie. Both material
and subject were we may believe imposed on the artist. The choice of
subject was no doubt due to the fact that de Lomenie's father had
distinguished himself in the events depicted.
In 1653 Claude painted for Signor Cardello the big picture already
mentioned, The Worship of the Golden Calf {L. V. 139), now in Grosvenor
House.

CJ

A A

4o CLAUDE LORRAIN
In 1655 Innocent X. died and was succeeded by Alexander VII. who
as Cardinal Fabio Chigi had been distinguished for his uprightness and
for his opposition to the abuses practised under his predecessors. The
virtues however which had distinguished the Cardinal were wanting in the
Pope. Abandoning the government to the " Congregazione di stato,"
(Alexander VII. devoted himself to the patronage of men of letters,
architects and artists. Among the last-named was Claude, who painted.
[for him two pictures. One of these represents the Rape of Europa,
apparently a favourite subject with the artist, for he has treated it in
three other canvases, in an etching (r — d. 22) dated 1634, and in a
finished sketch, dated 1670, in the British Museum. The other is a
landscape known as The Battle of the Bridge, from the bridge covered j :>||;
with combatants which forms the foreground. Both these pictures are
now in the gallery of Prince IssoupofF in Russia.
The new Pope on his accession had sternly refused to indulge in the
nepotism which had disgraced the reigns of his predecessors. The •
Jesuits however and other interested advisers persuaded him to change \ ,
his policy. The Papal Court was soon filled with his relatives, who
received rich benefices and appointments. It was for one of his nephews, |*A 'k. '¦¦•¦¦
Don Camillo, that the splendid palace in the Piazza Colonna was built
at a cost, according to a contemporary, of 100,000 scudi. For this
magnificent abode Claude painted in 1658 the picture now in the
National Gallery, variously known as David at the Cave of Adullam \
[J and Sinon brought before Priam (Nat. Gal. 6, L. V 145). For the
grand simplicity of composition and for the rendering of atmosphere
this canvas ranks as one of the artist's best.
Even Mr. Ruskin, while criticising the foreground of this picture for
its false and monotonous colouring, has pronounced it a really fine work
of Claude. The year following the election of Alexander VII. was marked by a
visitation of the plague which decimated Rome. Many fled the city.
Claude and Poussin remained, painting on serenely, the latter busy on a
commission for the Due de Crequy, the new French ambassador, the
former working for Signor Cardello and a certain " illmo Sigr Frenessio."
Among the three pictures mentioned in the Liber Veritatis under this
date, one, a landscape with Jacob bargaining for Rachael (L. V. 134),

St. Paula leaving Ostia. Dulwich Gallery.

42 CLAUDE LORRAIN
remarkable for a peculiar silvery quality of light, deserves special
mention. It is now one of the chief treasures of Petworth.
Claude and Poussin were neighbours, living at the time, as it would
appear from a census taken immediately after the plague, in the Strada
Paolina, the modern Via Paola, running from the Ponte St. Angelo to
the Church of S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini.
How then account for the tradition which ascribes to Claude as his
domicile the ' Tempietto ' on the Trinita de' Monti, and to Poussin a
neighbouring house, No. 9 of the same piazza ?
Perhaps both artists may have sought refuge in the lower town from
the miasmas.
There is no documentary evidence in support of the ' Tempietto '
theory. Traditions however die hard. Harder in Rome, perhaps, where
they have wound their roots in and out among the stones, than elsewhere.
No one nurtured in the belief that Claude and Poussin lived on the
Trinita de' Monti and looked out daily over that wonderful view
of Rome will willingly surrender that belief.
It would be impossible within the limits of our space to enumerate all
Claude's works during the next few years. The artist, if he was a slow
worker, was an assiduous one, sometimes producing as many as five
pictures in one year. Among the principal pictures of this period we
may mention the Metamorphosis of the Apuleian Shepherd (Z,. V. 142),
painted for M. Delagarde in 1657, now in the Bridgwater Collection, a
combination of landscape and marine with figures of Polyphemus, Acis
and Galatea (L. V. 141) for the same patron, now in the Dresden
Gallery, a very fine Flight into Egypt (L. V.. 154) painted for Antwerp,
now in the Hermitage, and The Decline of the Roman Empire, now in
Grosvenor House, painted, as the inscription in Claude's own writing
on the drawing (L. V 153) shows "pour M. le Brun, Roma." The
drawing (L. V. 82) for a smaller picture of the same subject also bears,
but in another hand, the name Lebrun.
Possibly this may have been the influential head of the French
Academy. The two artists must certainly have met, Lebrun having
studied in Rome from 1642 to 1648.
J Another picture of this period was a landscape with Esther for

CLAUDE LORRAIN

43

its subject (L. V. 146), painted for Claude's former patron, the Bishop
of Montpellier. This has disappeared.

The Tempietto, on the Trinita de' Monti, Ro

The loss is the more to be regretted that, according to Baldinucci-
this work was, in the painter's own opinion, his best.

4+ CLAUDE LORRAIN

CHAPTER IV

LATTER YEARS

Fame and wealth had come to Claude, but the latter years of his
)life were not without their trials. One of these was his failing health.
(Baldinucci informs us that from the age of forty Claude was much
troubled with the gout. To a man of Claude's active habits such a
malady must have been a terrible burden. No more walks in the
dewy morning or the misty evening over the Campagna, no more sunny
days at Tivoli and Subiaco, his old haunt, Villa Madonna, perhaps as a
farthest limit, and the Forum for a nearer sketching-ground. Some
times, perhaps, not even that, and the poor artist, mewed up in his
studio, would be obliged to have recourse to his souvenirs and to his
sketches from nature. How much store he set on the latter we know
from Baldinucci, who relates that Claude painted one very fine picture
for himself from nature at Vigna Madama, near Rome, for which his
Holiness Clement IX. offered him as many gold pieces as would cover
it, but was never able to get it out of ! his hands, for he asserted, as.
was indeed true, that " he made use of it every day to see the variety
of trees and foliage." We may note, too, that in his will Claude ex
pressly qualifies two of the pictures which he kept in his house {The
Flight into Egypt and The Journey to Emmaus) as " painted on the spot
by my hand" and "a landscape painted from nature."
From this will we learn that in February of 1663 Claude was
suffering from an illness which threatened to prove fatal.
Believing his end to be at hand, the artist sets about putting his
affairs in order. He turns over the pages of the book which records
his life's work, and on the drawing No. 158 scrawls the following
inscription: "Audi 26 frebrare 1663 a questo mio libro si ritrovano
cento e cinquanta sette disigne di mano mio. questo di suditte faict per
1 excellem0 Contestable Colonna Claudio Gillee manra in Roma." On
the 28th he sends for a notary, and makes his will in the presence of

CLAUDE LORRAIN

45

" Claude Bellin Burgundian, Dominique Barriere, of Marseilles, and
Francois du Jardin, of the diocese of Lorraine." This will is interest
ing for the light which it throws on the painter's character and the
glimpse which it gives us into his household.
The man whom it shows us is pious, simple, kindly. First, he
commends his " soul to God and to the Holy Mother and to his
Guardian Angel, and to all the Saints in heaven, praying the Divine
Majesty to vouchsafe to receive it into the glory of Paradise." He
wills that his body be buried in the church of the Santissima Trinita
de' Monti, limits the expense of his funeral to fifty scudi, and that
of a monumental slab to sixty scudi.
The first and principal beneficiary is Agnes, a little girl of whom
we know nothing, save what the testator has chosen to tell us in a
clause inserted, as if in anticipation of inquiries, at the end of the will.
" I state and declare that the aforesaid Agnes is a little girl, now nearly
eleven years old, as the certificate of baptism testifies, living with me
and brought up in my house, where she now lives in charity." For
the maintenance and guardianship of this favourite child ample and
minute provision is made. She is to be placed after the painter's death
in a convent of her own choice, and eleven " lochi 1 of the Monte di
S. Bonaventura " are bequeathed to her, of which " she alone shall
enjoy the usufruct until she marries or becomes a nun." For either
of these cases special provisions are made. By another clause three
additional luoghi di Monte Novenale are assigned to her for life.
A third portion of the furniture, including the artist's bed and her
own, his ebony writing-desk, the picture already alluded to of The
Flight into Egypt, a small Madonna, after Guido, and another small
picture, are bequeathed to her " for the great attention which I have
received from her." Most precious legacy of all, the Liber Veritatis
is left to her, with the proviso that at her death it shall return to
the artist's heirs. Two apostolic notaries, Renato della Borna and
Francesco Causer are appointed to be her guardians and trustees.
1 These lochi or luogi di monti were a species of investment created in Italy
towards the end of the sixteenth century ; and, although often subject to an arbitrary
diminution of interest, were considered good securities. They were somewhat analogous
to modern municipal bonds.

46 CLAUDE LORRAIN
We are free to build up what theory we may please about this
little girl to whom the artist leaves his dearest treasures.
Lady Dilke, pointing to the fact that between the years 1648 and
1652 there is no date in the Liber Veritatis, has conjectured that the
romance of Claude's life took place in those years.
The next legatee is the nephew mentioned by Sandrart, Jean Gellee,
to whom the painter leaves, "for the good service which he has ren
dered me while in my house," twelve luoghi di Monti, two pictures, a
drawing, and various pieces of furniture.
Then follow various smaller legacies, amongst them a picture, a land
scape, with a gold medal of Pope Innocent, to his nephew, Claude, son of
Melchior Gellee, " to the honoured Church of the Trinita de' Monti a
picture, half size, by the late Carlo Lorenese, on canvas," and " a land
scape in water colours in two pieces to decorate the edifice of the Holy
Trinity, when the Holy Sacrament passes it," " twenty-five scudi and a
picture of Christ going to Emmaus " to the honoured Church of the
Lorraine nation, to that of St. Luke " ten scudi and a copy of my
portrait which is in the lower room." 1
To his old friend Cardinal Rospigliosi the artist bequeaths two draw
ings to be chosen from among his studies, "for the good advice which he
has always given me ; " to Monsignor di Belmonte, " a little picture on
cypress wood in remembrance of the favours which I and mine have
always received from him ;" to his godchild, Gio. Piomer, six drawings to
be chosen by his executors ; "to Catherina, daughter of Master Antonio
Andre, tailor, my compere,'' forty scudi, and to each of the Apostolic
notaries, < already mentioned, a picture.
Claude's illness did not last long.
The next entry in the Liber Veritatis (No. 159) runs thus : — " Au
dy 26 May, 1663, Claude fecit Roma e pour Anvers," the picture referred
to being a large landscape with Mercury and Bacchus, now in the collection
of .the Duke of Devonshire. The artist's energy was unimpaired. For
the next few years he continued to produce three or four pictures every
year. His skill, however, was not always on a level with his energy. His
hand, doubtless under the influence of the gout, often seems to have lost
1 Portrait and copy have both unfortunately disappeared, and the only likeness of
Claude with any claim to authenticity is the woodcut by Sandrart in the Academia.

Egeria and her Nymphs, painted in 1 669. Naples Museum.
From a photograph by G. Brogi. By permission.

48 CLAUDE LORRAIN
its old cunning. Side by side, however, with canvases which show sad
evidences of advancing age, we find others in which the artist's genius
reasserts itself with all the old charm.
The chief patron of Claude's latter years was the Constable of Naples,
/Don Filippo Colonna, head of the great Roman family of that name and
husband of the beautiful and witty Maria Mancini, one of Mazarin's
nieces, famous for the passion which she inspired in the youthful breast
of Louis XIV. and for the escapades of her later life.
The Liber Veritatis records eight pictures painted for this nobleman.
The first of these would seem, from the already quoted inscription on
drawing No. 158, to have been finished just before the illness which
caused the artist to make his will. The last was painted in 1 681, the
year before his death.
The major part of these pictures and most of the others by Claude,
which once adorned the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, are now in private
collections in England, one (L. V 175) Egeria and her Nymphs, is in
the Museum of Naples. The most famous is the exquisite landscape,
one of two in which the artist has introduced the myth of Cupid and
Psyche, generally known as The Enchanted Castle (Z. V. 162), now in
the possession of Lord Wantage.
It was the remembrance of this picture in conjunction with the sight
of Teignmouth which prompted the beautiful lines of Keats in a letter to
his friend J. R. Reynolds : —
" You know the Enchanted Castle, it doth stand
Upon a rock, on the border of a lake,
Nested in trees, which all do seem to shake
From some old magic-like Urganda's sword.
O Phcebus ! that I had thy sacred word
To show this castle in fair dreaming wise,
Unto my friend, while sick and ill he lies.

The doors all look as if they oped themselves,
The windows as if latched by Fays and Elves.
And from them comes a silver flash of light,
As from the westward of a summer night,
Or like a beauteous woman's large blue eyes
Gone mad thro' olden songs and poesies.

The Enchanted Castle, " Liber Veritatis." From the mezzotint by R. Earlom.

50 CLAUDE LORRAIN
See ! What is coming from the distance dim !
A golden galley all in silken trim. !
Three rows of oars are lightening, moment whiles
Into the verd'rous bosoms of these isles ;
Towards the shade under the castle wall
It comes in silence, — now 'tis hidden all.
The clarion sounds and from a postern gate
An echo of sweet music doth create
A fear in the poor herdsman, who doth bring
His beasts to trouble the enchanted spring —
He tells of the sweet music and the spot
To all his friends and they believe him not."
Another constant patron of the artist at this period was Monseigneur
de Bourlemont, who in 1 644 went to Rome to obtain the Pope's confirma
tion of his election to the Archbishopric of Toulouse. Between that
date and the prelate's second visit to Rome in 1667, Claude painted three
landscapes and a marine for him, Moses and the Burning Bush (L. V.
161), Cepkalus and Procris (L. V. 163), Apollo and the Cumaan Sibyl
(L. V 164), Demosthenes on the Sea-shore (L. V 171). Of these works
one, the Cephalus and Procris is in the Doria Palace at Rome, the others
have found their way to England.
.__-* The Moses and the Burning Bush, now in the Bridgewater Collection,
is a large landscape, excellent in tone. A majestic tree occupies the
middle ofthe foreground. Behind stretches a broad and varied expanse
of undulating country. Unfortunately the general effect is sadly marred
by the obtrusive figure of Moses in the centre, supplicating the burning
bush, for which bush we have to look some time before we discover it, a
red-brown patch of paint, high up on a rock shelf close to the frame !
Mr. Ruskin has instanced this composition as a proof of Claude's
I " incapacity of understanding the main point in anything he had to re
present," but it should be remembered that the Claudian point of view
was that the figures were merely accessories — we might rather say excuses
for — the landscape, not by any means the main point thereof. The
picture entitled Demosthenes on the Sea-shore, also in the Bridgewater
Collection, is a large marine, the sea and sky with a setting sun painted
with all Claude's wonted skill. The composition looks to modern eyes
somewhat theatrical, as is so often the case with Claude's pictures. We
are apt to forget that in Claude's day these arrangements, these ficelles

CLAUDE LORRAIN

51

as the French call them, had not been used and abused for several
centuries on the stage.
The general tone is still fine and was probably finer, but the picture
has suffered from time and varnish. Here again our pleasure is marred
by the big figure in the centre and the lumpy cattle in the foreground
on the right.
In March, 1667, Cardinal Giuglio Rospigliosi was raised to the Ponti
ficate. We have seen from Claude's will that this prelate was a special
friend of his. The entries in the Liber Veritatis show that he was his
patron. " Pour Sigr Monre Ruspiose," as he is written down on one
drawing in the Liber Veritatis, per lementissimo Cardinale Rospioglo,
as he is styled on another, Claude had painted two landscapes, one
(Z. V 15), The Piping Herdsman, the. other (Z. V. 34), Peasants attacked
by Brigands. A third picture was begun for Rospigliosi when cardinal, and finished
after his elevation to the Papal throne, as the inscription on the drawing
(Z. V. 70) bears witness. This inscription goes on to state that the
subject is taken from the story of Aglauros, Herse, and Mercury.
" Favola cavata," so it runs, " nell' annotazione del secondo libri di
Ovidio." The words used in describing the subject are identical with those in
the Annotazione by G. Horologgi to Anguillara's translation of Ovid's
Metamorphosis. It would seem, therefore, that this was the book which
furnished Claude with his classical incidents.
Commissions continued to come to Claude from all sides. We find
him about, this time painting two pictures for Sicily. One of these was a
marine with the call of St. Andrew and St. Peter, the sketch (a pen and
ink drawing) for, or from, which in the Liber Veritatis (165) is so
singularly beautiful and luminous as to make us doubly regret that the
picture cannot now be traced. The other (Z. V. 172) is a graceful
pastoral with a shepherd piping and goats, now in the collection of Lord
Northbrook. In 1668 Claude painted two landscapes for a German patron, the
Count Waldstein. Baldinucci says four, and adds that two were intended
for the Emperor Leopold I. Both these pictures are now in the
Pinakothek at Munich. In each case the incident is taken from the story
d 2

52 CLAUDE LORRAIN
of Hagar. One (Z. V. 173) represents an early morning effect. Hagar,
with her child, is being dismissed from the patriarch's abode, a stately
classic palace. The other represents the appearance of the angel to
Hagar, the scene being laid in the midst of a well-wooded and well-
watered country with the grotto of Posilippo in the background. If we
can condone these absurdities the pictures are very charming ones. For
another German patron, Francesco Mayer, of Ratisbon, a councillor of
the Elector of Bavaria, Claude painted in 1667 the beautiful landscape,
The Ford (Z. V 176), now also at Munich.
In June of 1670, Claude was again so seriously ill, that on the 25th
of the month he sent for a notary to add a codicil to his will.
From the opening clause of the codicil, which refers to the will made
on 28th February, 1663, "o altro piu nero tempo," and from the final
one, which declares that any writing in his hand concerning a will or
other dispositions or last wishes which may be found in his house after
his death (other than the will of 1663 and this codicil) are to be con
sidered null and void, it would appear that Claude had more than once,
since his illness of 1663, believed himself at death's door and made
provision accordingly.
The codicil of 1670 confirms the bequest made to Agnes, " mia
zitellaf my little maiden, as she is affectionately termed, and adds to it
500 scudi, a gold medal of Pope Urban, a gold chain of the value of ten
scudi and a diamond ring.
The artist's property is to be divided into four parts and of these
one is to be given to the nephew Jean Gellee, who resided with him and
kept house for him. Then follow various other legacies.
It is specially enjoined on his heirs that they shall cause fifty masses
to be said for the repose of his soul in the church of St. Denys at
Chamagne, within eight days of the news of his death.
The provisions of this codicil were sufficiently vague to give rise to
misunderstandings among the artist's heirs, and to lawsuits which lasted
down to the present century.
Claude was not long recovering from this illness. His energy was
still unabated. Not so his powers. From Baldinucci we know that the
artist in his latter years was only able to work two or three hours a day.
In all the works of this period there is evidence of his failing health.

CLAUDE LORRAIN

53

It becomes more marked in some of his subsequent pictures. The
cold tone which pervades many of them is totally unlike the golden
sunshine of Claude's earlier days.
It would seem that ill health was not the only cross which cast its )
shadow over the latter years of the artist's life. Envy and ingratitude
conspired to disturb his peace of mind.
Claude continued to suffer from the old annoyance of forgeries. In ')
connection with this Baldinucci tells a curious story. Claude, mindful'
perhaps of the kindness which he himself had received at Tassi's hands,
had taken into his household a poor lame and deformed boy, Giovanni
Domenico. This lad received from his protector instruction in drawing and
painting, also in music, an art in which Claude used often to seek
relaxation. Domenico passed twenty-five years under Claude's roof, and
is said to have acquired great skill in painting after the manner of his
master. Envious tongues whispered that Claude's works were not painted by
his own hand. The whispers reaohed Domenico's ears and so inflated him
with vanity that, having quitted Claude's house, he claimed remuneration
for his services during the years that he had been the artist's pupil and
protege. Claude valuing his peace of mind more than his money, without
delay or demur, caused the claim to be paid out of his funds in the
Bank of Santo Spirito. Domenico, it is added, died very shortly
after. Though Claude's powers were failing him patrons, new and old, kept
him fully occupied.
Among the former were Falconieri, Constable Colonna, Francesco
Meyer, M. de Bourlemont, and a relative of Clement IX., Cardinal
Massimo. It was for the last named that Claude painted in 1673 the strange
composition now at Holkham with Perseus and Pegasus for figures, for
background rocks of a formation unknown to the geologist, but full of a
weird charm.
Among Claude's new patrons were Prince Gasparo Altieri, another
relative of Clement IX. and Cardinal Spada.

54 CLAUDE LORRAIN
The former received the Landing of Mneas {L.V. 185), the latter a
landscape with Philip Baptizing the Eunuch (Z. V 191), now in the
possession of Mr. W. B. Beaumont, and a curious composition Christ's
Appearance in the Garden (Z. V 194), in which the three vacant crosses
and the sepulchre are introduced with much effect. This picture,
formerly in the Beckford Collection, cannot now be traced, but there
is a drawing for it dated 1675 at Chatsworth, and another in the British
Museum. The latest date which occurs in the Liber Veritatis is 168 1, in which
year Claude painted the picture just mentioned, and for Constable Colonna
a landscape, Parnassus and the Muses (Z. V 193). We know, however,
from a drawing of the Temple of Castor and Pollux dated 1682, now in
the British Museum, that the artist worked up to the last year of his life.
With the fall of the leaf Claude breathed his last.
/ On the 23rd of November, 1682, his two nephews and Agnes
summoned the notary Vannius to attest the painter's decease. Claude
died, as the notary's endorsement on the will testifies, in a house just
opposite the Arco dei Greci, a kind of covered way which still exists,
connecting the church of St. Anastasio dei Greci with the Seminary, off
the Via Babuino.
Despite the high prices paid to him for his pictures Claude died
relatively poor. Baldinucci states that owing to his great generosity to
his relatives during his life, the artist's property at his death amounted
only to the value of 10,000 scudi.
Claude was buried, as his will directed, in the church of Sta.
Trinita de' Monti. Over his grave in front of the chapel of the
Santissima Annunziata his nephews placed a slab with a laudatory
Latin epitaph.
In 1798, during the occupation of Rome by the French, this church
was ransacked by the soldiery. This slab disappeared, and for nearly
forty years Claude's grave remained unmarked. In 1836 the French
Government decided to remove the great artist's remains from the Trinita
de' Monti to the church of St. Luigi de' Francesi, near the Pantheon.
This was done with great solemnity, the representative of France and
a large number of French artists, then resident in Rome, taking part in
the function.

CLAUDE LORRAIN 55
A meagre monument was erected in St. Luigi to Claude's memory
with the following inscription : —
A Claude Gelde dit Le Lorrain
peintre francais
mort a Rome en MDCLXXXII
et inhume" en l'6glise
de la Trinitd des Monts
la France
a consacre ce monument
Louis Philippe Ier etant roi des Francais
A. Thiers ministre de l'interieur
S. Fay de la Tour Maubourg
Ambassadeur du roi a Rome
MDCCCXXXVI
Subsequently a Latin inscription was placed in the Church of the Trinita
over the spot where Claude's remains had formerly reposed. The real
monuments to Claude's memory are the works of his genius.
Of one of these, the Liber Veritatis so frequently alluded to, we
have now to speak.

CHAPTER V
THE " LIBER VERITATIS "
In calling the Liber Veritatis a monument to Claude's memory, we
are using no figure of speech. In this wonderful book we have an
epitome of the artist's life and work, an epitome written and illustrated
by his own hand.
The Liber Veritatis is a collection of two hundred drawings, not, as
the title might lead us to expect, studies from nature, but sketches from
or perhaps for the artist's pictures.
Baldinucci gives the book the name of Libro d' Invenzione or Libro di
Verita, and asserts that the idea of composing it occurred to the artist
about the time that he received the important commission already spoken
of for the King of Spain.
" Poor Claude," says Baldinucci, " simple-minded as he was by nature,

5 6 CLAUDE LORRAIN
not knowing whom to guard against among the many who frequented
his room nor what precautions to take, seeing that every day similar
pictures were brought to his house that he might pronounce whether they
were by his hand, resolved to make a book which I saw with great
pleasure and admiration, he himself showing it to me in his own house in
Rome ; and in this book he began to copy the composition {invenzione)
of the works which he executed, expressing in them with a truly masterly
touch, every smallest detail of the picture itself, making a note also of
the person for whom it had been painted and, if I remember rightly, the
sum he had received for it ; to which book he gave the name of Libro
d'Invenzioni or Libro di Verita, and thenceforth whenever any picture of
his or not of his were brought to him to look at, without wasting words
he would show the book saying, ' I never send any work out of my studio
without making a copy of it, with my own hand in this book after its
completion. Now I want you yourself to be the judge in our doubt, so
look through this and see if you recognise your picture ; ' and as any one
who had stolen that composition could not come near the mark by a
long way, so the difference was at once evident to every one's eyes and
the forgery apparent
The motive assigned to the artist by Baldinucci for the composition
of the Liber Veritatis has been frequently called in question. It is
argued that the book does not contain sketches of all the artist's works.
There are many important and undoubted pictures by Claude executed
after the date assigned for the commencement of the Liber Veritatis,
which are not represented in it. It is also contended that a mere sketch
of the main composition of a picture would not be sufficient proof in
cases of forgery.
Further, of the two hundred drawings only one hundred and forty-
one bear mention of the people for whom the pictures were painted ;
forty-five have only the name of the place for which the pictures were
destined. In one case Claude mentions that the picture is still in his
own possession. Some drawings are simply endorsed, " Claudio fecit
in V.R.," and even this inscription, in many cases, is not in the artist's
own handwriting. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the
painter's object in forming this collection of designs was not so much
to make a precise register of the disposition of his works — a register

CLAUDE LORRAIN 57
which on occasion might be used to confute forgers — as to preserve
for himself a souvenir of his works.
" Audi 10 dagouto 1677 ce present livre
Aupartient a moy que ie Jaict durant ma vie
Claudia Gillee dit le lorane. A Roma le 23 avril 1680.''
So runs the inscription in Claude's own handwriting on a sheet of paper
stuck to the first drawing in the book.
The Liber Veritatis was to Claude much what the fly-leaf of the
family Bible is in many old-fashioned English families — a place to
register the birth of each new member and note any important events
of after life. To Claude his pictures were his children.
Were the drawings of the Liber Veritatis draughts for or sketches
from the pictures ? The generally received opinion is that the drawings
were made from his finished pictures, as is asserted by Baldinucci.
Lady Dilke opines that they were sketches made beforehand, to put
into shape what the artist calls on some other drawings his pance
{pensee). There is perhaps truth in both views. The majority of the
drawings seem to have been made from the pictures, but there are
some which look much more like preliminary sketches.
The value which the artist set on the Liber Veritatis is shown by
the special mention which he makes of it in his will. The artist's
wishes were strictly adhered to. The Liber Veritatis remained for some
time an heirloom in the Gellee family. D'Argenville saw it in the
possession of a niece of the painter. The Cardinal d'Estrees in vain
offered any price for it on behalf of Louis XIV. Subsequently the
book came into the hands of a French jeweller, who disposed of it in
Holland. About 1770 it was purchased by the then Duke of Devon
shire, and since then has remained in the possession of the Cavendish
family in that great treasure-house of art, Chatsworth.
Through Alderman Boydell it was reproduced in mezzotint by
Richard Earlom, and published in two volumes in 1777. Subsequently
a third volume was added, containing reproductions of one hundred
drawings by Claude from various collections. In 18 15 a selection of
plates from the Liber Veritatis was published in Rome, under the title
of Libro di Verita, by Caracciolo. Boydell's publication, although

58 CLAUDE LORRAIN
Claude's drawings are by the side of Earlom's reproductions of them
as "Hyperion to a satyr," has conferred an immense boon on lovers
and students of art by permitting many to form some idea of what
must otherwise have remained to them a closed book. Only those,
however, who have had the privilege of inspecting the original work
can fully appreciate all the real charm and delicacy of these drawings.
In the course of the vicissitudes to which it has been exposed, the
Liber Veritatis has suffered as a whole. Thus it would appear to have
been rebound, perhaps more than once, probably by a French binder. In
this process many of the drawings have been cut down with so little care
that part of Claude's inscriptions on them have been lost. The order of
the leaves too has been disregarded, many of the sketches which belong
chronologically to the end of the book having been inserted at the begin
ning. Worst of all not a few of the drawings have been tampered with.
Some evil-minded person — Earlom it is generally supposed — has pre
sumed to accentuate the fading values with the lavish brush and brutal
touch of a man bent on producing an effect.
These blemishes apart, the drawings are all in good preservation.
Each bears on its face the painter's signature, generally a monogram,
composed of the letters C. and L., sometimes the date and a note
referring to the subject of the picture. These, with one exception,
are in Claude's own writing. On the back are short inscriptions
repeating the signature and giving notes as to the disposition of the
pictures, the date of their execution, &c. These inscriptions are in
a curious jumble of French, Italian, and Latin. A careful examination
of them has shown that they are not all in the same writing. Side
by side with Claude's hand we find another which, from a certain
family likeness, Lady Dilke thinks is that of one of his nephews.
The same writing appears on some of Claude's drawings in the
Albertine Collection. This writing differs again from a third which
appears in the French names Lebrun and Robert Gayer, &c. It is large
and delicate like a French hand of last century, and might well be that of
the French jeweller, in whose possession d'Argenville saw the Liber
Veritatis in Paris. From these inscriptions it would appear that Claude
composed the Liber Veritatis from several albums, for on the back of
drawing No. 185 is written " Jai finij ce present livre ce jour duy 25 du

The Finding of Moses, " Liber Veritatis." From the mezzotint by R. Earkm.

60 CLAUDE LORRAIN
mois de mars 1675 Roma," which scarcely seems to tally with the
inscription already quoted affixed to drawing No. 1.
Perhaps, however, these various dates mark moments of the " altro
piu nero tempo," when the artist may have believed that his work was at
an end. It is time to turn from bibliographical and historical details about the
Liber Veritatis to the drawings themselves.
Of the two hundred drawings one hundred and three are on white,
the remainder on gray or blue paper. They are executed with pen or
pencil, washed with bistre or Indian ink, the high lights touched in with
white. The first impression which we receive as we turn over the pages
ot the Liber Veritatis is that of the intense artificiality of the art
that it records. It is, as it were, a man speaking Latin instead of his
own mother-tongue. Classic ruins, seaports, pasture lands, herds and
1 herdsmen, piping shepherds, dancing peasants, gods, saints, banditti,
/ sportsmen, all seem to belong to an unreal world — a world where things
j arrange themselves, or rather are evidently arranged by the artist, with
(a view to certain preconceived ideas about composition. The harmony
of line, the unity of ensemble, aimed at by the artist, and nearly always
/attained, aggravate the eye of a generation taught to shun in landscape-
art the well-balanced composition which delighted the seventeenth
century. Turn over a few more pages.
The eye gradually accustomed to the Claudian world, bewitched by
its sunlight and its atmosphere, begins to dwell with pleasure on the
ruins and the marble palaces, the wooded hillsides crowned with con
venient towers, the meanderings of impossible rivers.
You have but to surrender yourself to the charm of this unreal
world to lose sight of its unreality and live in it as one lives in a dream.
The artist gives us the "great key,
To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,
Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves,
Echoing grottos, full of tumbling waves
And moonlight ; ay, to all the mazy world
Of silvery enchantment ! "

CLAUDE LORRAIN 61
We are carried far away from this workaday world of ours into an"
ethereal domain whence all toil, distress, and terror have purposely been
banished by the painter. The inhabitants of this ideal world are as
gods. Its skies are all but cloudless. All the rough places in it are
made smooth.
Such is the Claudian landscape, the quintessence of reality distilled
in the alembic of a poet's soul. Surely only the sternest moralist
will condemn its charm.
When at last you close the book and turn from this world of Claude's
to nature, you feel for a moment like a man who steps from a concert-
room, where he has been listening to the music of Beethoven and
Mozart, into the din and glare of the street. " Mere idle dreaming,"
says the moralist, " no more to be encouraged than the smoking of
opium or hashish." To which we would answer that, just as there
are certain states of body, in which opium or hashish may not only
afford respite from pain for a moment, but thereby help the body
to gather fresh strength, so there are moods of mind (who has not
known them ?) in which all the sordidness of the " world we jostle "
seems to pursue us, driving us to take refuge in something outside
and beyond it. It is in such moments that art like Claude's is peculiarly
valuable, affording as it does " a rest, a quiet haven " where we may
dream away an hour in the contemplation of the ideal.
" Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour."
It must indeed go hard with us if they do not
" Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls,"
— a light, in the reflected glow of which this gray world of ours catches
a new glory.
Before we close the Liber Veritatis it is well to note that side by
side with their poetic charm the drawings possess technical qualities
of a high order. They express the most difficult effects of light and
atmosphere with a simplicity and a directness which it would be difficult
to surpass.

62 CLAUDE LORRAIN

CHAPTER VI
CLAUDE AS A PAINTER
Hitherto we have spoken of Claude's pictures only in relation to
his life. It is time to consider their intrinsic merit, and to try to
determine Claude's place among painters of landscape. Before doing so
it may be well to glance very briefly at what had been done before his
day in landscape art.
The man who first substituted for the golden or coloured chequer
background in picture or illuminated letter, a blue sky graduated to the
horizon may rank as the initiator of landscape-painting, as we understand
that art.
This was as Mr. Ruskin has remarked " the crisis of change in the
spirit of mediaeval art," the transition from the Symbolic to the Imitative
Method. This took place early in the fifteenth century.
Mr. Ruskin has chosen Dante as the great exponent of mediaeval
feeling for landscape, and all who know the great poet's keen observance
of every changing phase of light and atmosphere, and his admirable
descriptions of the beauties of Nature, will confirm the choice. Some may
perhaps be puzzled by an apparent discrepancy in dates. Apparent only,
for besides the fact that every change in the human mind finds its expres
sion earlier in literature than in painting, we must remember that like all
great men, Dante was far ahead of his time, ahead in his appreciation of
nature as he was in his conception of art.1
We need not therefore be surprised if the landscapes of the Divina
Commedia precede by a century, the first efforts to represent landscape
pictorially on the imitative method.
The appreciation of nature which we find in Dante, we find again in
Boccaccio — although as becomes a master in the art of telling a tale,
1 Vide the description of the marble sculptures which line the path of Purgatory.
Purgatorio, x. 31-93.

CLAUDE LORRAIN 63
Boccaccio's landscapes are always discreetly subordinated to his figures —
and even more markedly in Petrarch.
The most conspicuous instance in the latter — as has been pointed out
by Burckhardt — is his description of his ascent of Mount Ventoux near
Avignon. He himself tells us in one of his letters how he had become possessed
by an indefinable longing for a distant panorama, a longing which grew
stronger and stronger ; how he was decided by the passage in Livy
describing Philip of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemus ; how deeply
impressed he was by the view, and how, on returning home, he opened that
favourite work of his, the Confessions of St. Augustine, and read aloud to
his brother, with an emotion which the latter could not understand, the
remarkable words in the tenth chapter. " And men go forth and admire
lofty mountains and broad seas and roaring torrents, and the ocean and
the course of the stars, and forget their own selves while doing so."
Nothing could show more clearly than does this incident the birth in
men's minds of a new feeling — perhaps it would be more correct to say
the resurrection of one which had lain buried for centuries — the Love of/
Landscape. Born simultaneously with, and in a measure fostered by, the
revival of classic learning, this love of landscape was destined at a later
date to be well nigh choked to death by it.
In the fourteenth century this feeling was, as we have seen, confined to
the master-minds. In the fifteenth it became much more general.
By the beginning of the following century it seems to have died out.
Benvenuto Cellini on his way to France traverses some of the most
romantic scenery of Switzerland with never a word of praise or wonder
for the beauty of the Alps and the glory of glaciers. In the seventeenth
century it was replaced by a love of everything that was unnatural and
grotesque, the artifices of the landscape gardener being held infinitely
superior to the beauties of nature.
To return to painting. We have seen that the fifteenth century
marks the beginning of Imitative landscape art as distinguished from
Symbolism but the influence of the latter continues long. Giotto having
got hold of something sufficiently like a mountain or a tree to pass for
such in the eyes of men, who know nothing about geology or botany,
and do not scrutinize real trees and real mountains, several generations of

64 CLAUDE LORRAIN
Italian painters — -Masaccio always excepted — are satisfied to go on paint
ing the Giottesque mountain and tree without further reference to nature.
While landscape, always as a mere accessory, is being thus cultivated
by the Italians, the Flemish artists, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, take up
the tale and unfold to the wondering eyes of the northern world visions
of Paradise based on their own glimpses into southern lands.
Thus two currents of landscape-art, one to the north, the other to
the south of the Alps were set a-flowing. The former receiving in its
course the contributions of Roger van der Weyden, Quinten Matsys,
Henri de Bles and Patinir, at a later date those of Breughel, Matthew
and Paul Brill, Elsheimer &c, the latter swelled by the genius of the
Venetians with Bonifazio and Titian at their head and mingling with the
current of the Eclectic school of the Caracci, met in Rome at the end
of the sixteenth century.
, Rome, while contributing nothing to the arts, save the memory of
her greatness, became the meeting place of all schools.
f Educated in this art-centre, Claude united the Flemish love for and
knowledge of perspective — Orizonte was the nickname by which Claude
was known among the Flemish artists in Rome — to the atmospheric
touch of the Venetians.
An examination of Claude's technique shows a strong similarity
between it and that of the Venetian school. Claude, although he occa
sionally painted on panel and still more rarely on copper, used for his
larger pictures a canvas with a strong coarse diagonal grain. Over this
he painted with a pretty firm impasto, not however so thick but that
the grain of the canvas shows through it in places, more particularly in
the most luminous parts of the picture. Then the artist set to work to
scumble and glaze over this first painting with an infinite number of
very finely graduated tones and an infinite amount of patience, often,'
as Sandrart tells us, passing a whole fortnight over a picture without
apparently bringing it any nearer completion.
Ignorant people, more particularly cleaners, take these little scum-
blings and glazings of Claude's for dirt and would fain remove them or
paint over them. Wiser eyes detect their purpose. It is thus that
Claude obtained the vibration of the atmosphere, the pulsation of sun
light, the scintillation of silvery wavelets. It was thus that "he

CLAUDE LORRAIN 65
painted " — it is Mr. Ruskin, Claude's direst adversary, who speaks —
" the effects of misty shadows cast by his (the sun's) rays over the;
landscape and other delicate aerial transitions, as no one had ever done
before, and in some respects as no one has done in oils since."
The process is similar to that by which Titian and Rembrandt conveyed
the many-faceted lustre of flesh. Take any piece of flesh painting by either
of these masters. It is false in colour now — we may doubt if ever it
was true — and yet it conveys the idea of flesh in a degree which many a
true colourist fails to attain. Compare Ingres' Source or any of M.
Bouguereau's nudities with Rembrandt's Susanna or Titian's portrait of
his mistress. There is the same difference between them that there
is between the transparent sparkle of Parian marble and the dull surface
of a plaster cast.
So it is with Claude's landscapes. They are seldom, if ever, true
in colour, and yet contrast them with the works of some colourists.
Take Corot for instance. Step from Claude's picture of the Campo
Vaccino in the Louvre to the study of Corot, which hangs in an
adjoining room, of the same subject from another point of view. Corot
is infinitely superior to Claude in his analysis of each separate fragment of
the colour-mosaic of the scene, but which of the two artists has most
successfully rendered the general impression of that scene ? Every one
who loves Rome and knows its atmosphere will, I think, decide in favour
of Claude. Before we leave the question of Claude's technique it is
worth noting that his experience as a fresco-painter does not appear to
have at all affected his manipulation of oil-paint. The bold, broad
sweep of the brush, which such an experience generally gives, is to be
found in none of Claude's canvases, at least in none that I have seen./
The drawings of the Liber Veritatis are to my knowledge the only works
of Claude's which show a hand schooled to produce the maximum of
effect with the fewest and simplest strokes of the brush.
Claude has sometimes been called the " father of modern landscape
art," but that title might be claimed for Titian and other Venetian
painters, who before Claude's day had from time to time painted land
scape pure and simple.
Claude's real merit, a merit as to the magnitude of which his admirers
and his detractors are at one, his real service to landscape art, lay in this,
E

66 CLAUDE LORRAIN
that he was the first painter to grapple seriously with the problem of
representing the disc of the sun. Before his day this had been done from
time to time, but timidly and in a semi-symbolic fashion. Thus the early
masters resort to the type employed in illumination, a star, red or yellow,
often with a face in it. There is a very interesting instance in a panel,
representing the Flight into Egypt, in the "predella" of Gentile da
Fabriano's masterpiece the Adoration of the Kings, in the Accademia
delle Belle Arti in Florence. This panel is, as Symonds has pointed out,
one of the earliest bits of true landscape art (1423). It represents a
sunrise. The sun's disc, just risen above the mountains is figured by a
ball in high relief of burnished gold, the rays by streaks of gold. The
very methods which these early painters adopted were a confession of
weakness. The experience of a later century echoed this confession. Leonardo
da Vinci formally declared that no picture of sunlight could possibly
appear true unless itself viewed in sunlight. Among the Venetians,
Bassano, as Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, and Titian, now and then, made
an attempt to represent the sun's rays.
Claude took up the idea seriously and worked it out successfully. It
is difficult for us who have been accustomed to see the sun constantly
represented in pictures to realise how great a revolution he thereby
wrought in landscape art.
Claude had, it would seem, few pupils properly so called. Baldinucci
says, that after the disagreeable incident with the faithless Domenico,
Claude determined never to have another pupil. Pascoli mentions as a
pupil of Claude's a certain Angelo or Angeluccio, who practised land
scape painting in Rome about 1680, with considerable success, but died
young. Perhaps however, Angelo was only one of many painters of
Claude's day — Gaspard Dughet (the brother-in-law and pupil of Poussin),
Hermann Swanevelt and Guillaume Courtois were probably among the
number — who were influenced by Claude's works and perhaps aided by
his advice, of which according to Baldinucci, Claude was most liberal to
all who chose to ask it.
Claude's influence on the landscape art of his own and of the
following centuries was enormous. The result of it was deplorable.
Landscape painters went to Claude instead of going to nature. They

CLAUDE LORRAIN 67
copied, as imitators are prone to do, all the defects of their model ; they
failed to perceive the good points. They borrowed all Claude's formulas
of composition and never moved beyond them. Nature was poured like
jelly into a mould.
Claude's influence on landscape art continued paramount, more
particularly in England, down to the middle of our own century. It left")
its mark indelibly on Turner's genius. Turner's study of Claude was)
partly forced on him by the pseudo-classic sentiment and the Claude-/
worship of his day, partly voluntary, for he recognised in Claude technical!
qualities which he himself did not possess ; above all he admired Claude,
as Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, for his success in painting what he
(Turner) could not — the orb of the sun. In his endeavour to assimilate
Claude's technique Turner never succeeded, and eventually adopted an
infinitely less masterly method, which we must deplore, for too often it
has not withstood " the heavy hand of Time." Other things Turner
did learn from Claude, not with advantage.
The mention of Turner leads us to consider the oft-repeated com
parison between the two masters, a comparison forced on posterity by
Turner himself. In speaking of what has been termed " the noble
passage of arms to which Turner challenged his adversary from the
grave," it must, in fairness to the older master, be remembered that
the choice of arms lay with Turner.
When the latter bequeathed to the National Gallery his two well-
known canvases, the Misty Sunrise and the Building of Carthage, it was
with the distinct proviso that they should " hang always between the two
pictures painted by Claude, The Seaport and The Mill." Claude
himself, or his admirers, might perhaps have selected others of his works
as expressing his powers better, and as being more suitable for com
parison with the two particular pictures chosen by Turner to represent
his genius. It would however have been difficult to find any picture of
Claude's which could be compared with Turner's Misty Sunrise, so
entirely is the sentiment expressed in it foreign to Claude's mind. To
attempt to compare the serene and idyllic atmosphere of Claude's Mill
with Turner's idealistic rendering of a northern mist and sea would be
as absurd as to compare Herrick and Browning.
When we come to Turner's Carthage and Claude's Embarkation ofthe
E 2

68 CLAUDE LORRAIN
Queen of Sheba, the case is different. The two artists have treated
kindred subjects in a kindred way, indeed Turner's picture shows at every
point the influence of Claude. In both we have the same well-balanced
masses of pseudo-classic architecture, a too evidently artificial com
position, helped out by the judicious disposition of the figures, a similar
effect of sunlight.
At the very first glance we see the superiority of Turner, the limita
tion of Claude. Claude seems like a caged bird, singing, and singing
very sweetly, but always the same trill. Turner is like Shelley's sky
lark. He has seen all heaven and all earth, and caught in his flight
the real radiance of the sun.
If we proceed to analyse the two pictures, we find in the Building of
Carthage artificialities even more glaring and faults bolder than any which
the cautious Claude ever perpetrated. Turner's architecture is the classic
of Regent Street, the colour more particularly in the foreground is heavy,
the sunlight which is supposed to come from the centre of the com
position comes from three or four different points outside of the
canvas, &c, &c.
A work of genius however is not a work that is free from faults, but
one which imposes itself despite its faults. Such is this, such are all the
works of Turner. It is in the rendering of light, particularly of the
direct rays of the sun, that Turner is incontestably Claude's superior.
Claude had grasped one big fact, the warm glow of sunlight, and
repeated it ad infinitum, spreading it with an even touch over every inch
of canvas. Turner went a step further. He analysed this glow, caught
from Nature the secret of the subtle silvery tones, the touches of cold
colour which occur even in the warmest effect of light and help to
heighten those effects.
Hence comes, as Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, " the perfect and
unchanging influence of all Turner's pictures at any distance. We
approach only to follow the sunshine into every cranny of the leafage
and retire only to feel it diffused over the scene, the whole picture glow
ing like a sun or star at whatever distance we stand and lighting the air
between us and it, while many even of the best pictures of Claude must
be looked close into to be felt and lose light every foot that we retire "
{Mod. Painters, vol. i., p. 149).

CLAUDE LORRAIN 69
To Turner moreover sunlight was the first, the essential, thing. He
never hesitated to sacrifice other things to it. Not so Claude. With at
complacency bordering upon dulness, he painted, square and fair, every
stone of his edifices and obedient to a tradition handed down from the
early Italian masters through Perugino and Raphael,1 traced carefully
and mechanically, as it were, with compass and ruler, every line of his
architecture, showing thereby that he considered the object illuminated
quite as worthy of his skill as the light itself.
Yet when all has been said that can be said about Turner's superi
ority and Claude's shortcomings, there remains to the older master a
charm of serenity and sweetness which it is impossible to gainsay.
Just as it is possible to admire the colossal genius of Wagner and yet
listen with enjoyment to the melody of Mozart or Haydn, so too we
may give Turner all his due without shutting our eyes to the merits
and beauties of Claude.

CHAPTER VII
claude's drawings

an

" The soul of the poet," it has been said, " is like a mirror of
astrologer ; it bears the reflection of the past and of the future, and can
show the secrets of men and gods, but all the same it is dimmed by the
breath of those who stand by and gaze into it."
So it was with Claude's soul. Left to himself the artist might per
haps, if we may judge from many of his studies from nature, have been
content to paint much simpler subjects, but his patrons wanted all those
sublime palaces crowded on to the quays, they wanted the nymphs and
shepherds as pegs on which to hang classic quotations, they wanted the
mill, the temple, and the breakwater, the company of soldiers and the
herd of cattle, all combining to produce what Mr. Ruskin has aptly
termed "a general sensation ofthe impossible." It was the spirit of the;
age that found its reflection in Claude's canvases !
It was an age when a traveller like Evelyn could see nothing in the
Alps but " strange, horrid, and fearful crags," could speak of the forest
1 Cf. P. G. Hamerton, Imagination in Landscape Art, p. 32.

70 CLAUDE LORRAIN
of Fontainebleau as "so prodigiously encompassed with hideous rocks of
white hard stone, heaped one on another in mountainous height' that I
think the like is nowhere to be found more horrid and solitary," and
presently proceed to gloat over Richelieu's villa with " its walks of vast
length so accurately kept and cultivated that nothing can be more agree
able," and "its large and very rare grotto of shell-work in the shape of
satyrs and other wild fancies."
Like many another artist before and since his day, Claude was obliged
to think of his patrons. So he would take his studies and submit them
to the process which a French painter of our own day termed "varnish
ing Nature for the public."
If we would see Claude most himself, Claude at his best, we
must follow him out into the Campagna, well away from the atmo
sphere of palaces — to Tivoli, or Subiaco, or la Crescenzia. With
no monsignori or grands seigneurs at his elbow to smile approval at the
elegance of his composition and suggest an episode from classic myth or
Bible history, with Sandrart perhaps at most for his companion, and he
busy looking about for the most grotesque tree-trunk, the most artificial
cascade, as an accessory to some historic scene, Claude, left entirely to
himself, can afford to be simple and natural.
To those who have only known Claude through his pictures, and
perhaps been repelled by their artificiality, Claude's drawings come as
a surprise and a delight. To appreciate these drawings rightly we must
study the originals. Neither the engravings after the drawings in the
Royal Library, made by Lewis and published by Chamberlayne in 1809,
nor the reproductions published by the former in 1824 and 1826, give
any idea of the character, and delicacy of the originals. There are,
however, good photographs of some of Claude's drawings by Braun,
and a few excellent facsimile engravings executed by the Chalcographie
of the Louvre.
From Baldinucci we know that Claude left, besides the Liber
Veritatis, five or six other volumes of sketches and a quantity of loose
drawings. It is probably to the dispersal of these that the various
public and private collections throughout Europe owe the drawings by
Claude which they possess. By far the greater part have found their
way to England. Many are in the hands of private individuals. The

CLAUDE LORRAIN

7i

collection, however, in the British Museum stands unrivalled, both for
quantity and quality ; it contains nearly three hundred drawings.
Claude used, as we have already seen in speaking of the Liber
Veritatis, two kinds of paper for his drawings — one white, the other
blue or gray. It would appear that he did not choose his paper
according to his subject, for there are some highly finished drawings,
others lightly indicated, on both kinds of paper. He would seem to

J^fcU

%,

¦••'¦ ..A- IMfAi

Study, from tlie "Chalcographie du Louvre!' By permission.

have employed the white more frequently in his earlier years. The
chronological arrangement of the drawings, however, is no easy matter,
for in the brief inscriptions on them dates seldom occur.
The drawings are executed in chalk, pen, pencil, brush. Claude
seems to have employed exclusively at first the point, either pen
or pencil. Gradually he had recourse to washes, outlining with
a pen, a procede for which all through his life he had a preference.

72

CLAUDE LORRAIN

Sometimes, however, in his middle period he discarded the pen altogether,
indicating the outlines with the brush. There is one drawing in the
British Museum (No. 0.0.7-162) representing the Arch of Titus at
Rome, in which we find the artist attempting a kind of water-colour ;
the sky is a faint blue, the foliage green, the stones drab, the ensemble
not unlike a water-colour drawing of the Early English school. Later
Claude resumed the pen with washes of bistre, Chinese ink, red

or

Italian Seaport, with Boats. British Museum.

yellow ochre. Sometimes he deepens the shadows by cross-hatchings
with red or black chalk. The drawings of his last years appear to have
been made very rapidly, and are too often devoid of any delicacy.
In the choice of subjects there is as much variety as in the choice
of material. Roughly speaking, however, the drawings may be divided
into two categories : first, sketches direct from nature ; and, secondly,
drafts from nature or from memory (perhaps adaptations of studies from
nature) with a view to making pictures. The latter are interesting as

CLAUDE LORRAIN

73

showing the process by which the artist moulded nature to meet his
own requirements (or those of his patrons) ; the former are much more
attractive from an artistic point of view.

The Arch of Titus. British Museum.

Mi

It is tfite to say that the best pictures are those which afford least
scope to the critic for long descriptions. Their very virtue consists

74 CLAUDE LORRAIN
in this that they express by colour, and form ideas which words cannot,
or can only feebly, express.
What is true of pictures is even more so of drawings. There is
so much, and yet so little, in a really artistic drawing. Words cannot
convey that subtle something which is its very essence. All the carefully
selected epithets of the critic are nothing in comparison with one glance
at the drawing itself. Thus it is that Claude's drawings are the most
difficult part of his work to speak about.
It would be easy enough to give a list of the subjects did space
allow, but to convey an idea of the grace and charm with which even the
most trivial subject is treated would be a difficult task.
Tivoli, as we know from Claude's biographers, was a favourite
sketching-ground with him. Again and again we find in these drawings
the Falls, the Castle, the Temple of the Sibyl — all the well-known
features of the place.
Studies of trees and foliage are very numerous ; sometimes indicated
in bold masses by touches of the brush ; at other times delicately out
lined in pen or pencil. Sometimes it is a sweep of the Campagna
dotted with farms which the artist shows us ; at others a bit of a
port, Marinella perhaps or Ostia, with a group of boats — real craft
that might brave a storm, not those impossible-looking holiday caravels
and galleons of the artist's pictures.
Anon, it is a bit of old Rome, the Arch of Titus, the Forum, the
Temple of Castor and Pollux, which he has sketched. It is worth
noting that in these drawings of architectural subjects he proceeds on
quite another principle than in his pictures. The T-square and the
plumb-line are forgotten, and the draughtsman indicates the massive
architecture with a real feeling for the beauty of broken stone and
the vibration of the atmosphere. Every now and again we come across
a figure-study ; and if many of these, more particularly the larger and
more elaborate ones, betray by their uncouthness that " mollo evidente
suo mancamento " of which Baldinucci speaks, yet there are others in
which the artist has jotted down his little figures with a grace and
ease which we would never have expected of him, and which makes
us forswear all the evil we had said or thought about' him in this branch
of his art. Among such studies we may mention with especial praise

at
s

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CLAUDE LORRAIN 77
the sketch for The Embarkation of S. Ursula, remarkable both for the
graceful grouping and delicate indication of the figures.
The skill and the delicacy which Claude manifests in his drawings
reasserts itself even more clearly in his etchings. These form a
sufficiently important part of the artist's work to claim a chapter to
themselves.

CHAPTER VIII
CLAUDE AS AN ETCHER
There are forty-four etchings by Claude extant. It is probable^
that this number represents all or nearly all his work in this line. Thei
Abbe de Marolles in the catalogue, published in 1666, of his great
collection of prints gives under Claude's name the entry, " II y a de celui-
ci 46 pieces." Proofs of Claude's etchings are extremely rare. A com
plete collection is an all but unattainable ideal. Fortunately the pub
lication within recent years of a series of reproductions of Claude's
etchings allows all lovers of the art to have access to what would other
wise have remained the treasures of a very limited circle. What Earlom
and Boydell did for the Liber Veritatis, MM. Amand-Durand and
Duplessis have done — but with infinitely greater taste and success — for
Claude's etchings. Thanks to the plates etched in facsimile by M.
Amand-Durand after the best obtainable proofs, the student and the con
noisseur can indulge themselves in the illusion that they have before them
the actual handiwork of the master. The notice by M. Duplessis, which
forms the preface to the volume, furnishes all, or nearly all, the informa
tion that can be desired about Claude's work as an etcher.
The majority of Claude's etchings are undated — some are even
unsigned — but from the dates attached to the others it would appear that
he dedicated himself to this branch of art during two distinct periods of
his life, the earlier from 1630 to 1637, the later from 1662 to 1663.
In the interval between these two periods only one date — 1651 —
occurs. It has been suggested with much show of probability that Claude's
attention may have been drawn to etching during his stay at Nancy

78 CLAUDE LORRAIN
by his compatriot Jacques Callot, the famous engraver and etcher,
the generous friend and rival of Claude's patron Deruet. Just at the
time that Claude was working at Nancy under Deruet Callot was engaged
on his famous plates of the Siege of Breda, and it may well be that the
sight of these wonderful etchings may have led Claude to try his hand
at the needle. Sandrart, too, may have encouraged Claude after his
return to Rome in his early efforts at etching. One of the earliest of
these efforts would appear to be the plate (R. D. 5)1 known as The
Tempest. It bears the date 1630, and represents an angry sea and a
storm-tossed vessel. It is one of the few instances in which Claude has
ventured to render Nature in her fiercer moods. In his endeavour to
render the form of waves driven by the wind, Claude is as far from the
truth as in his drawings of trees, mountains, and clouds. There is-,
however, as always in Claude's work, a picturesque effect as a whole.
If we examine this etching from a technical point of view we see
that the artist already handles the needle with considerable skill, but
is not yet entirely master of his procede. Thus the sky is indicated by
parallel lines, after the fashion of an engraving. There is a tendency
in sky and sea to get mixed up together, despite the difference Of
treatment in each. The plate is badly bitten, hence a monotony in
values. The same defects appear in a more or less degree in The Sketcher
(R. D. 9), The Apparition (R. D. 2), and The Flight into Egypt (R. D. 1),
which we may therefore suppose to be early works. It is in the plate
known as The Brigands (R. D. 12), dated 1633, that Claude first reveals
his real skill as an etcher. In the firmly drawn foliage of the trees in
the foreground contrasting with the delicately indicated distance, we
detect the touch of a master-hand. Crossing the Ford (R. D. 3), 1634,
and The Herd at a Watering-place (R. D. 4), 1635, show gradual pro
gress. In the latter, a mere sketch, and somewhat heavy in the treatment
of the background, we remark a much^ greater freedom of touch.
The next year saw the production of one of Claude's most successful
1 The numbers preceded by the letters R-D refer to the list of Claude's etchings in
Robert Dumesnil's Le Peintre Graveur Francais, vol. xi. 1871. The order in this list,
though far from correct chronologically, has for the sake of convenience been adhered
to by all subsequent writers on the subject.

CLAUDE LORRAIN 79
and best known etchings, The Herdsman (R. D. 8). With the genius of I
a true poet Claude has 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. The fragments of columns
which peep from under the trees on the right, instead of provoking, as
the accessories of the Claudian landscape too often do, a reminiscence of
the stage, harmonise discreetly with the sentiment of the surroundings.
The execution in this work is on a par with its poetic feeling.
" Even so the etcher's needle on its point
Doth catch what in the artist-poet's mind
Reality and fancy did create."
Claude would seem to have been as laborious a worker in etching as
he was in painting. In his earlier plates he employs the needle only, but
soon learns to use the burnisher and the dry-point. The plate in
question is an instance of Claude's conscientious and unobtrusive labour.
A careful examination shows that there is scarcely any portion of it
which has not been worked over two or three times. Of this etching
one of the best modern authorities on the art has said : " For technical
quality of a certain delicate kind this is the finest landscape etching in
the world. Its transparency and gradation has never been surpassed." x
The same delicacy and luminosity which distinguish The Herdsman
are displayed in the Seaport with a Lighthouse (R. D. 10), and even more
conspicuously in the Sunrise (R. D. 15). The subject treated is one
which Claude loved to paint. It afforded him scope to display his skill
in the rendering of sea and sky. The etching indeed corresponds, with
some slight differences, to the drawing No. 5 in the Liber Veritatis.
There exist four pictures of the subject : one at the Hermitage, one in
the Dresden Gallery, one in Lord Yarborough's collection, and one (of
doubtful authenticity) at Hampton Court. To grapple with this subject
in etching was to attack the greatest difficulty of the etcher's art —
the rendering of a sunlit sky.
We leave it to the authority already quoted to say how far Claude
succeeded. " This etching is remarkable for the inexpressible tenderness
1 P. G. Hamerton, Etching and Etchers, p. 142.

80 CLAUDE LORRAIN
of its sky. When heretics and unbelievers say that skies cannot be done
in etching, it is always convenient to answer them with a reference to
this plate ; but the truth is that although the sky is marvellously tender,
and in this respect undoubtedly the finest ever etched, the cloud-forms
are so simple and so little defined that Claude's success in this instance
has not solved more than one of the great sky-problems." l
In the following year (1637) Claude was engaged in etching the
plates (R. D. 28 — 40) known as the Fireworks. Impressions of these
plates are very scarce. Their artistic merit is small. For a long time
they excited and puzzled the curiosity of collectors. It is only of recent
years that the enigma has been solved by the discovery of a volume of
Spanish twelve-syllable verses {silvas) entitled Descripcion de las fiestas
que el Sr. Marques de Castel Rodrigo Embaxador de Espana celebro en es-
ta corte ala nueva del election de Ferdinando III. de Austria, Rey de
Romanos, Hecha por miguel bermudez de Castro. En Roma por
Francisco Caballo m.dc. xxxvii con licencia de los superiores. This volume,
now in the possession of M. Dutuit, bound in its original binding of
white parchment, is adorned with the arms of Pope Urban VIIL, the
Barberini bees, whence it would appear to be a copy presented to the
Pontiff. Bound up with this Spanish work is an account of the festivals
in Italian. There is also another Italian version with a different
title and dedication, but it is doubtful whether it was illustrated by
Claude's etchings. The festivities in honour of the accession of
Ferdinand III. to the crown of the Empire and to the title of King of the
Romans lasted the better part of a week and were on a very magnificent
scale. There were Te Deums in the churches, comedies and ballets in
the Piazza di Spagna, and on several evenings grand displays of fireworks
with set pieces symbolical of the glories of the Empire. Claude's four
teen etchings show us these fireworks in various phases.
After the execution of these plates the artist apparently laid aside the
etching needle for many years. It has been pointed out by Lady Dilke as
a significant fact that Claude's interest in etching seems to have ceased in
the very year that his friend Sandrart left Rome.
The next date which occurs is that of 1651. The etching which
bears this date is known as The Flock in Stormy Weather (R. D. 18).
1 P G. Hamerton, Etching and Etchers, p. 421.

Dance under the Trees. From the Etching by Claude.

82 CLAUDE LORRAIN
/Claude was, as we have already seen in considering his pictures, a fair-
weather artist. We need scarcely be surprised, therefore, if in this
plate he has failed to make the most of a sky heavy with a just-bursting
storm. There is, however, an interesting effect of wind and rain in
the rendering of the trees and foliage. The three columns on the right,
supporting a broken architrave, are etched with a firmer touch and
in a more picturesque way than any other piece of architecture treated
by Claude. Between 1651 and 1662 comes another gap. It is of course possible
that some of the undated plates may have been executed in these
intervals. Two etchings — the largest which Claude produced — bear the date
1662 — Mercury and Argzts (R. D. 17) — a variant of the picture painted
in 1659 pour M. Bosout (Z. V 150) — and Time with Apollo and the
Seasons (R. D. 20). The following year saw the production of The
Goatherd (R. D. 19,). It has been suggested that the revival of
Claude's interest in etching towards the latter part of his life may have
been due to Dominique Barriere. This engraver — a native of Mar
seilles — migrated to Rome ; at what date we do not know, but he
was certainly there as early as 1656, in which year he executed a plate
for Queen Christina of Sweden. Between the years 1660 and 1668
he engraved five of Claude's pictures. We have already seen that
Barriere acted as one of the witnesses to the will of 1663.
In certain of Claude's etchings there is a tendency to heaviness, a
defect which — always supposing that these etchings belong to the artist's
later period — may have been caught from Barriere.
It is chiefly on the plates of his earlier period that Claude's reputation
as an etcher rests. Even these are very unequal in merit. The Brigands
(R. D. 12), The Dance by the Water Side (R. D. 6), The Dance under the
Trees (R. D. 10), and one or two others are superior to the rest, many
of which fail in the rendering of values.
It may seem curious that Claude should frequently have failed to
obtain in etching what is pre-eminently his strong point in painting-
values ; but this must be ascribed to his want of experience in the
process of biting his plates.
There is one plate — The Village Dance (R. D. 24) — corresponding

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Z>^« ^ //<? «"^r &'<&• *™w fA? EutinS by Claude-

84 CLAUDE LORRAIN
to a picture in Grosvenor House which in its early state shows that
Claude made the experiment of a method which long afterwards Goya
employed with great skill — viz., the mixture of aquatint with etching
properly so called. The experiment did not satisfy him. He ground
down the surface which he had apparently roughened in the first instance
with a piece of pumice-stone. The trace, however — a kind of fissure —
appears in the later states.
One thing he never does. He never condescends to work simply
for effect ; he never aims at being " clever." There is a consciousness
and a restraint about all, even the weakest, of his etchings, which fully
compensate for the lack of brilliancy in some of them. In his best work
he attains a delicacy and a tenderness which few other etchers of any
period have equalled, none surpassed.

CONCLUSION
" Claude Lorrain knew the real world thoroughly, even to its
smallest detail, and he made use of it as a means to express the world
contained in his own beautiful soul. He stands to Nature in a double
relation ; he is both her slave and her master ; her slave, by the material
means which he is obliged to employ to make himself understood ; her
master, because he subordinates these material means to a well reasoned
inspiration, to which he makes them serve as instruments."
Thus wrote Goethe. Elsewhere he expresses his admiration for the
depth and grasp of Claude's powers.
It would be impossible within the limits of our space to quote all the
criticisms on Claude scattered up and down the pages of Modern Painters,
criticisms so scathing that it is difficult to acquit their author of the
charge of prejudice. Indeed Mr. Ruskin himself admits that, if he have
a prejudice, it is against Claude.
The following may serve as examples : —
" It would take some pages of close writing to point out one by one
the inanities of heart, soul and brain which such a conception {i.e. Claude's
Moses and the Burning Bush) involves ; the ineffable ignorance of the

CLAUDE LORRAIN gf
nature of the event and of the scene of it, the incapacity of conceiving
anything, even in ignorance, which should be impressive, the dim, stupid,
serene, leguminous enjoyment of his sunny afternoon-burn the bushes
as much as they liked."— Modern Painters, vol. iii. part iv. section 25.
And again —
"If Claude had been a great man he would not have been so
steadfastly set on painting effects of sun ; he would have looked at all
nature and at all art, and would have painted some effects somewhat
worse, and nature universally much better."— {Id. vol. iii., part iv.,
section 23.)
These two diametrically opposite verdicts represent and sum up two
different phases of public opinion with regard to Claude. Goethe wrote
towards the end of the last century, when Claude was still in the meridian
of popular favour, Mr. Ruskin in the middle of our own, when Claude's
sun was just beginning to pale before that of Turner.
It was not long before, in England at least, Claude was completely
eclipsed by his rival.
This change of public opinion was brought about quite as much by
Mr. Ruskin's pen as by Turner's brush It was Mr. Ruskin who dispelled
the false worship of Claude, stripped the idol of the votive offerings of
blind admirers and hurled it from its pedestal. In so doing the great
critic rendered an eminent service both to the cause of art and to Claude's
true reputation.
A later generation, not blind to Claude's faults, but content to over
look them for the sake of his qualities, raises the poor fallen idol, a god
no more, but none the less a thing of beauty, and sets it up again in
the temple of art, no longer on the high pedestal where it stood before,
but in a humbler shrine, where some still stop, not, as of old, to bow
the knee before its miraculous powers, but to dwell lovingly on its
beauty and its grace, to mark the poet's soul which breathes beneath
its antique form.

LIST OF PRINCIPAL WORKS ON CLAUDE LORRAIN
READ OR REFERRED TO.
Sandrart, J., Academia Nobilissima; Artis Pictura.. Nuremberg, 1683.
Baldinucci, F., Notizie de' Professori del Disegno. Firenze, 1681-1728.
Earlom, R., Liber Veritatis of Claude le Lorrain. London, 1777.
Chamberlaine, J., Engravings from Original Designs in H.M. Collection. London,
1797.
Boydell : A Collection of Landscapes after the Original Pictures of Claude Lorrain and
Gaspar Poussin. London, 1801.
Denon, V., Claude Gelce le Lorrain, n. d.
Caracciolo, L., Libro di Verita. Roma, 181 5.
Smith, John, Catalogue Raisonne, Vol. VIII. London, 1837.
Lewis, F. C, Liber Studiorum of Claude Lorraine. Engravings from 100 drawings in
the British Museum. London, 1840.
Blanc, C, Histoire des Peintres de toutes les Ecoles. Paris, 1848, et seq.
Laborde, Comte Leon de, Notes Manuscrits de Claude Gelle dit le Lorrain, extraites
du Recueil de ses Dessins. (Archives de l'Art Francais, Vol. I., 185 1—2.)
Cousin, Victor, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien. Paris, 1853.
Del Tal, F., Le Livre des Feux d' Artifice de Claude Gellee. (Gazette des Beaux Arts,
Vol. XL, 1 861.)
He'quet, Charles, Essai Biographique sur Claude Gellee. (Journal de la Societe
d'Archeologie Lorraine.) Nancy, 1863.
Meaume, E., Claude Gellee dit le Lorrain. (Robert Dumesnil, Le Peintre Graveur
Francais, Vol. XL, 1871.)
Hamerton, P. G., Turner et Claude Lorrain. (L'Art, Vol. VII., 1876.)
Sweetser, M. F., Claude Lorrain (Artist Biographies). Boston, U.S.A., 1878.
Pattison, Mme. Mark (Lady Dilke), Claude Lorrain, sa Vie et ses CEuvres, d'apres des
Documents Inedits. Paris, 1884.
Michel, Emile, Claude Lorrain. (Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol. LXI., 1884.)
Dullea, O. J., Claude Gellee le Lorrain. London, 1887.
Also the following bearing indirectly on the subject.
Ruskin, J., Modern Painters. London, 1851, particularly Vols. I., II. , III., V.
Hamerton, P. G., Etching and Etchers. London, 1868.
„ ,, Imagination in Landscape Art. London, 1886.

INDEX

Acis and Galatea, 42
Agnes, 45, 46, 52, 54
Albertina, 58
Aldobrandini, 8, 35
Alexander VII., 40
Allegrini, Francesco, 25
Altieri, Gasparo, 53
Amand-Durand, 77
"Ancient Port of Messina, The,'' 30
Andre, Antonio, 46
Andre, Catarina, 46
Angelo, or Angeluccio, 66
Antwerp, 42, 46
" Apollo and the Cum_ean Sybil," 50
d'Argenville, 16, 57, 58
Bagnaia, 15
Baldiniicci, 12 — 16, 18, 20, 21, 36, 38,43, 44, 51
—56, 66, 70, 74
Balestra, Palazzo, 24
Barberini, Family, 31, 34, 80
Barberini, Maffei, see Urban VIII.
Barriere, Dominique, 45, 82
"Battle of the Bridge," 40
Bavaria, 16, 52
Beaumont, 54
Beckford Collection, 54
Bellin, Claude, 45
Belmonte, 46
Bentivoglio, Cardinal, 28, 30, 34
Bertolotti, 13
Bethune, Ph. de, 28, 34
Borghesi, 8
Borgognone, Carlo, 15
Boma, Renato della, 45, 46
Bouillon, Due de, 35
Bourdon, Sebastian, 26
Bourlemont, de, 50, S3
Boydell, 57, 77
Bridgwater Gallery, 42, 50
Bril, Paul, IS
British Museum, 54, 71, 72
Buonamici, see Tassi
Callot, J., 78
Caracciolo, S7
Cardello, 38, 40
Castel Gandolfo, 31
Castel-Rodrigo, Marquis de, 36, 80
Causer, F. , 45
"Cephalus and Procris,'' 50
Chamagne, 10, 16
Chantelou, de, 34
Charmes, Forest of, 12
Chatsworth, 54, 57
"Christ's Appearance in the Garden," 54
Civita Vecchia, 19, 30
Clement IX., 31, 44, 53
Colonna, 8, 44, 48, 53, 54
" Combatants, The," 30
Courtois, Jacques, 25, 38
Courtois, Guillaume, 25, 66
Crequy, Due de, 40
Crescenzio, Cardinal, 22
"David at Adullam," 40
Decline of Roman Empire, The, 42

Delagarde, 42
" Demosthenes on the Sea-shore,'' 50
Deruet, Claude, 16, 18, 78
Devonshire, Duke of, 57
Dilke, Lady, 13, 20, 24, 46, 58, 80
Domenico, G., 53, 66
Dresden Gallery, 42
Dughet, Gaspar, 66
Dumesnil, R., 78
Dulwich Gallery, 28, 3S
Duplessis, 77
Dutuit, 80
Earlom, Richard, 57, 58, 77
"Echo and Narcissus," 32
" Egeria and her Nymphs," 48
Elsheimer, 14
" Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba," 35, 67
" Embarkation of St. Paula," 38
" Embarkation of St. Ursula," 77
"Enchanted Castle, The," 48
Errard, Charles, 19, 20
" Esther," 42
d'Estrees, Cardinal, 57
Etchings by Claude, 78—80, 82
Ferdinand III., 80
Fiamengho, Bartolommeo, 15
"Finding of Moses, The," 38
" Flight into Egypt, The," 42, 44, 45
Florence, 15
" Ford, The," 35, 36, 38
Frascati, 21
Freiburg, 14
Frenessio, 40
Gellee, Claude, called Le Lorrain, his birth and
family, 5, 10, 12 ; his friendship with Sandrart,
12 ; his youthful inaptitude for learning, 13 ;
apprenticed to a pastrycook, 14 ; goes to
Rome, 14 ; to Naples, 14 ; returns to Rome,
15 ; apprenticed to Tassi, 15 ; travels for two
years, 16 ; practises at Nancy, 16, 17 ; returns
to Italy and settles in Rome, 20 ; his failing
health, 44 ; his will, 45, 52 ; his death and
burial, 54 ; his body removed from Sta.
Trinita de' Monti to San Luigi, 54 ; inscrip
tion on his tomb, 55
Gellee, Family, 10, 12
,, Claude, 12, 46
„ Dominique, 12
,, Denis, 12
,, Francois, 10
,, Jean, 12—15, 28> 46, 52
„ Joseph, 13, 15
,, Melchior, 46
,, Michel, 12
Genoa, 15
Gentileschi, 15
Giorio, Cardinal, 31
Giustiniani, 21
Goethe, 84
Gomassin, Martin, 15
Grenoble, 34
Grosvenor House, 24, 38, 42, 84
" Hagar,'' 52

INDEX

Harlaching, 16
Hermitage (St. Petersburg), 42
Holkham, 53
Innocent X., 34, 36, 40, 46
"Israelites adoring the Golden Calf, The,1' 24, 38
Issoupoff, Prince, 40
Italy, 19, 34, 36
"Jacob bargaining for Rachel," 40
Jardin, Francois du, 45
" Landing of Cleopatra, The,'' 32
" Landing of -Eneas, The," 54
Lauri, Filippo, 25, 38
Lebrun, 42
Leghorn, 15
Lely, 24
Leopold I. , 5 1
Liancourt, Due de, 35, 36
"Liber Veritatis," 13, 32, 35, 38, 40, 45, 46,48,
51, 54—58, 6o, 61, 70, 71, 77, 79
Lomenie, Henri de, 38
Lorraine, 10, 14, 16, 18, 45, 46
Lorraine, Duke of, 16
Lorenese, Carlo, 46
Loretto, 16
Louis XIII., 18, 20, 28,38
Louis XIV., 30, 57
Louvre, The, 28, 30—32, 36, 38, 65, 70
Ludovisi, 8
Ludwig I. of Bavaria, 16
Madrid, 36
Mancini, Maria, 48
Marolles, de, 77
Massimo, Cardinal, 53
Mayer, F. , 52, 53
" Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, The," 35
Marseilles, 19, 45, 82
Meaume, 18
Medici, Cardinal, 31
Medici, Cosimo de', 15
Medici, Marie de', 19
" Mercury stealing the Cattle of Admetus,'' 35
" Metamorphosis of the Apuleian Shepherd," 42
Methuen, Lord, 34
Miel, Jan, 25, 31
Michel, Emile, 31
"Mill, The," 35,67
Montalto, Cardinal, 15
Montpellier, Bishop of, 43
" Moses and the Burning Bush,'' 50.
Moselle, 31
Munich, 16, 51, 52
Miintz, Eugene, 15
Muti, 22
Nancy, 16, 18, 34, 77
Nantes, 19
Naples, 14, 15, 48
National Gallery, 32, 35, 40, 67
Nocret, Jean, 34
Northbrook, Lord, 51
Orsini, 8
Padose, Anne, 12
Pamfili, Camillo, 34
Pamfili, Cardinal, 34
" Parnassus and the Muses," 54

Passart, 34
Pascoli, 66
Passeri, 8, 15
Paul V., 8, 15
Payne, Knight, 16
" Peasants attacked by Brigands," 51
Peretti, 8
Pesth, 35
Petworth, 42
Phalsbourg, Prince de, 18
" Philip baptising the Eunuch," 54
Philip IV., 36
Philip V, 36
Piles, de, 25
Piomer, G. , 50
" Piping Herdsman," 51
Poli, Cardinal, 31
Portarlington, Lord, 38
" Port of Marinella, The," 31
"Port of Messina, The," 31
Poussin, 25, 34, 40, 66
Quesnoy, F. du, 25
" Rape of Europa, The," 40
Rome, 6 — 8, 14 — 16, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 30, 32,
35, 40, 42, 50, 54, 57, 60, 64, 74, 78, 80,
82
Rospigliosi, Cardinal, 31, 46, 51
Ruskin, 40, 50, 62, 65—67, 69, 84, 85
Saint-Georges, Guillet de, 26
Salimbeni, 15
"Samuel anointing David," 32
San Benedetto, 21
Sandrart, 12 — 16, 20—22, 25, 26, 28, 46, 64, 78,
80
" Seaport, The," 67
Sicily, 51
" Sinon brought before Priam,'' 40
Spada, Cardinal, 53
Subiaco, 21, 44, 70
Swanenvelt, H., 66
Tassi, Agostino, 8, 14 — 16, 53
Tempesta, 18
"Temple of Apollo at Delos, The,'' 35
Thirty Years' War, 14
Tivoli, 20, 21, 25, 30, 44, 70, 74
"Tobit and the Archangel," 38
Toul, 10
Turner, 67, 68, 69, 85
Tyrol, 16
" Ulysses restoring Chryseis," 36
Urban VIIL, 6, 30, 31, 34, 80
Vannius, 54
Velazquez, 36
Venice, 16
"View near the Forum," 38
Vigna Madama, 44
" Village Dance, The," 31
Viterbo, 15
Vosges, 10
Waels, 14, 15
Waldstein, Count, 51
Wantage, Lord, 48
Wellington, Duke of, 38
Windsor, 34

3 9002 00468 7951

*