Landscape Art 
Claude Lorrain and the re-envisioning of Europe's landscapes.
Morning in the Harbor
late 1630s
Oil on canvas
29 1/8 x 38 3/16 inches
(74 x 97 cm)
Guggenheim Hermitage Museum
Sunrise, Claude le Lorrian, 1630s.
Claude Gelleé, Claude Lorrain, French Baroque Era Painter, ca.1602-1682.
Although he was born in the duchy of Lorraine and spent his entire maturity in Rome, Claude is considered, along with Poussin, one of the two founders of the French school of painting. He also made a body of prints, their subjects, for the most part, parallel to those of his paintings: pastoral, biblical, and historical themes set in expansive, light-filled landscapes. His paintings were picturesque, not sublime. The castles and ruins were of special importance. They humanized the landscapes, making them more worthy of aesthetic appreciation.
Claude's painting became associated with picturesque travel. Over the course of the following decade he became the most famous landscape artist of his time. His depictions of seaports at sunrise or sunset were appreciated throughout Europe. To avoid imitations of his work, he sketched all his compositions into a sketchbook, and these were later made into engravings that were bound as Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth).
While traveling, people noticed real landscapes that reminded them of Claude paintings - landscapes that were "picturesquely beautiful," pretty enough to be Claude paintings. Ideal landscapes, composed pieces of scenery--filled with light and inspired by the poets of antiquity and bucolic poetry--are also characteristic of a further artistic movement, of which Claude Lorrain is considered the primary representative.
Claude's drawings are of great beauty; his fantastic landscapes are bathed in sunlight and haze. His goal, and the goal of other landscape artists of his day, was not to depict nature as they saw it but to treat it in an idealized manner. He chose elements of landscape that would relate to each other according to principles of clarity and order.
Impact of Claude Lorrain
"In the record of western culture there is nothing to compare with this vogue for landscape that arose in this period." p. 88
"They often carried Claude (Lorraine) glasses, pieces of tinted, framed glass with handles....the significant fact is that the glass helped to create a pastoral illusion."
"images of perfect harmony between man and nature ... as if he knew that this perfection could last no longer than the moment in which it takes possession of our minds."
p. 89 Marx, Machine
Seaport at Sunset, 1639
For the first time in the history of art, Claude represented the sun in his works as the source of light. In Seaport at Sunset, the sun dominates the air and colors the ships and buildings. Claude treated light with an unparalleled subtlety which was not surpassed until the Impressionist era. His use of light, space, and atmospheric tones left their mark on all subsequent landscape painting up to the 20th century.
Essay
“A fitting artistic subject ”
by
Joseph Siry
Claude Gelleé was a painter of visions, trained in Rome where he spent most of his life.
He captured a mood among affluent mercantile bourgeois classes.
"
He was one of very few seventeenth-century artists who painted only landscapes and his innovative manner and consummate technique contributed to the acceptance of pure landscape as a serious art form."
One key to his success is that he created an idealised interpretation of the countryside around Rome and imbued his landscapes with references to the much idolised antique. This is epitomised here in the portrayal of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, which was one of the best known and most dramatically sited of all the surviving antique monuments of Rome and the Campagna.
Claude has given the work strong Arcadian overtones, Arcadia being the location of pastures and woods associated with many ancient gods.
The key relationship in this work is the emblematic classical temple painted within the idealised landscape bathed in golden light. Claude includes a shepherd playing a flute, thus aligning landscape with music and harmony, alluding also to the gods Apollo and Pan, ancient gods with musical attributes. According to legend, Arcadia was the birthplace of Pan.
He took to the wild limited only by his
education and training yet in his exhibition of his craft he elevated the absence of people in the landscape into a national icon of unsurpassed reverence.
"the rhetoric of the technological sublime."
Leo Marx, p. 195.
Contact
J. Siry,
Sources
study guide
Date: 19 January 2008
