page_title: Claude Lorrain
section_title: Critical assessment and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Claude Lorrain / Critical assessment and legacy
context_page_description: Claude Lorrain was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in Italy, and is one of the earliest important artists, apart from his contemporaries in Dutch Golden Age painting, to concentrate on landscape painting. His landscapes are usually turned into the more prestigious genre of history paintings by the addition of a few small figures, typically representing a scene from the Bible or classical mythology.
  By the end of the 1630s he was established as the leading landscapist in Italy, and enjoyed large fees for his work. These gradually became larger, but with fewer figures, more carefully painted, and produced at a lower rate. He was not generally an innovator in landscape painting, except in introducing the Sun into many paintings, which had been rare before. He is now thought of as a French painter, but was born in the independent Duchy of Lorraine, and almost all his painting was done in Italy; before the late 19th century he was regarded as a painter of the "Roman School". His patrons were also mostly Italian, but after his death he became very popular with English collectors, and the UK retains a high proportion of his works.
context_section_description: As seen in his painting The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, Claude was innovative in including the Sun itself as a source of light in his paintings.
  In Rome, Bril, Girolamo Muziano and Federico Zuccaro and later Elsheimer, Annibale Carracci and Domenichino made landscape vistas pre-eminent in some of their drawings and paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings  or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but it might be argued that not until Claude's generation, did landscape completely reflect an aesthetic viewpoint which was seen as completely autonomous in its moral purpose within the cultural world of Rome.
  In this matter of the importance of landscape, Claude was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography.
  Claude Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death.
  John Constable described Claude as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude's landscape "all is lovely – all amiable – all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart".
caption: Wash drawing of a view of the Campagna
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