Claude Lorrain

Born Claude Gellée in the Duchy of Lorraine, based his entire working career in Rome after arriving as a teenager, apparently to work as a pastry cook before discovering painting. Claude essentially created the formula of the ideal classical landscape — the genre that dominated European landscape painting from his era to Constable and Turner — and did so with a consistency and completeness that was immediately recognized. The formula: a foreground scene of classical figures (shepherds, merchants, mythological personages); a middle distance of water (harbor, lake, river) or open meadow; a far distance of atmospheric haze and golden light; trees of idealized form framing the view on left and right. What animated the formula beyond its mere components was the quality of the light: Claude studied and painted the Roman Campagna obsessively, particularly at dawn and dusk, and his paintings convey a specific quality of luminosity — the way the air above still water glows at the hour before sunrise — that has never been exceeded and has rarely been equaled. The figures in his landscapes are almost invariably small and mythological, serving as scale markers and subjects of contemplation rather than centers of interest. The landscape itself is the protagonist. So widely imitated was he that he kept the Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), a bound collection of ink drawings recording every painting he finished, so he could prove his originals against forgeries and copies. The Liber is now in the British Museum. Turner, who worshipped Claude above all other painters, requested in his will that two of his paintings hang permanently beside Claude's in the National Gallery — a request that was honored, and they still hang there. Constable described him as 'the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw.'