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Claude Lorrain (Lorraine, c1604 - Rome, November
23, 1682) was a France|French painter considered
to be one of the greatest landscape painters.

He was born of very poor parents at the village of
Chamagne in Lorraine. When it was discovered that
he made no progress at school, he was apprenticed,
it is commonly said, to a pastry-cook, but this is
extremely dubious. At the age of twelve, being
left an orphan, he went to live at Freiburg on the
Rhine with an elder brother, Jean Gele, a
wood-carver of moderate merit, and under him he
designed arabesques and foliage. He afterwards
rambled to Rome to seek a livelihood; but from his
clownishness and ignorance of the language, he
failed to obtain permanent employment. He next
went to Naples, to study landscape painting under
Godfrey Waals, a painter of much repute. With him
he remained two years; then he returned to Rome,
and was domesticated until April 1625 with another
landscape-painter, Augustin Tassi, who hired him
to grind his colours and to do all the household
drudgery.

His master, hoping to make Claude serviceable in
some of his greatest works, advanced him in the
rules of perspective and the elements of design.
Under his tuition the mind of Claude began to
expand, and he devoted himself to artistic study
with great eagerness. He exerted his utmost
industry to explore the true principles of
painting by an incessant examination of nature;
and for this purpose he made his studies in the
open fields, where he very frequently remained
from sunrise till sunset, watching the effect of
the shifting light upon the landscape. He
generally sketched whatever he thought beautiful
or striking, marking every tinge of light with a
similar colour; from these sketches he perfected
his landscapes.

Leaving Tassi, he made a tour in Italy, France and
a part of Germany, including his native Lorraine,
suffering numerous misadventures by the way. Karl
Dervent, painter to the duke of Lorraine, kept him
as assistant for a year; and he painted at Nancy
the architectural subjects on the ceiling of the
Carmelite church. He did not, however, relish this
employment, and in 1627 returned to Rome. Here,
painting two landscapes for Guido
Bentivoglio|Cardinal Bentivoglio, he earned the
protection of Pope Urban VIII and from about 1637
he rapidly rose into celebrity. Claude was
acquainted not only with the facts, but also with
the laws of nature; and the German painter Joachim
von Sandrart relates that he used to explain, as
they walked together through the fields, the
causes of the different appearances of the same
landscape at different hours of the day, from the
reflections or refractions of light, or from the
morning and evening dews or vapours, with all the
precision of a natural philosopher. He elaborated
his pictures with great care; and if any
performance fell short of his ideal, he altered,
erased and repainted it several times over.

His landscapes present to the spectator an endless
variety; so many views of land and water, so many
interesting objects, that, like an astonished
traveller, the eye is obliged to pause and measure
the extent of the prospect, and his distances of
mountain and of sea, are so illusive, that the
spectator feels, as it were, fatigued by gazing.
The edifices and temples which so finely round off
his compositions, the lakes peopled with aquatic
birds, the foliage diversified in conformity to
the different kinds of trees, all is nature in
him; every object arrests the attention of an
amateur, every thing furnishes instruction to a
professor. There is not an effect of light, or a
reflection in water which he has not imitated; and
the various changes of the day are nowhere better
represented than in Claude. In a word, he is truly
the painter who, in depicting the three regions of
air, earth, and water, has combined the whole
universe. His atmosphere almost always bears the
impress of the sky at Rome, whose horizon is, from
its situation, rosy, dewy, and warm; his skies are
aerial and full of lustre, and every object
harmoniously illumined. His distances and
colouring are delicate, and his tints have a
sweetness and variety till then unexampled. He
frequently gave an uncommon tenderness to his
finished trees by glazing. He did not however
possess any peculiar merit in his figures, which
are very indifferent and insipid, and generally
too much attenuated; but he was so conscious of
his deficiency in this respect, that he usually
engaged other artists to paint them for him, among
whom were Jacques Courtois|Courtois and Filippo
Lauri. Indeed, he was wont to remark to the
purchasers of his pictures that he sold them the
landscape, and presented them with the figures
gratis. In order to avoid a repetition of the same
subject, and also to detect the very numerous
spurious copies of his works, he made tinted
outline drawings (in six paper books prepared for
this purpose) of all those pictures which were
transmitted to different countries; and on the
back of each drawing he wrote the name of the
purchaser. These books he named Libri di yenta.
This valuable work has been engraved and
published, and has always been highly esteemed by
students of the art of landscape. Claude, who had
suffered much from gout, died in Rome at the age
of eighty-two, on the 21st (or perhaps the 23rd)
of November 1682, leaving his wealth, which was
considerable, between his only surviving
relatives, a nephew and an adopted daughter
(?niece).

Many choice specimens of his genius may be seen in
the National Gallery, London and in the Louvre;
the landscapes in the Altieri and Colonna palaces
in Rome are also of especial celebrity. A list has
been printed showing no less than 92 examples in
the various public galleries of Europe. He himself
regarded a landscape which he painted in the Villa
Madama, being a cento of various views with great
abundance and variety of leafage, and a
composition of "Esther and Ahasuerus," as his
finest works; the former he refused to sell,
although Pope Clement IX|Clement IX offered to
cover its surface with gold pieces. He etched a
series of twenty-eight landscapes, fine
impressions of which are greatly prized. Full of
amenity, and deeply sensitive to the graces of
nature, Claude was long deemed the prince of
landscape painters, and he must always be
accounted a prime leader in that form of art, and
in his day a great enlarger and refiner of its
province.

Claude was a man of amiable and simple character,
very kind to his pupils, a patient and unwearied
worker; in his own sphere of study, his mind was
stored (as we have seen) with observation and
knowledge, but he continued an unlettered man till
his death. Famous and highly patronized though he
was in all his later years, he seems to have been
very little known to his brother artists, with the
single exception of Sandrart. This painter is the
chief direct authority for the facts of Claude's
life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Filippo
Baldinucci|Baldinucci, who obtained information
from some of Claude's immediate survivors, relates
various incidents to a different effect (Notizie
dei professoni del disegno).

See also Victor Cousin, Sur Claude Gele (1853); MF
Sweetser, Claude Lorrain (1878); Lady Dilke,
Claude Lorrain (1884).
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commonscat|Claude Lorrain
1911