Sunday, April 10, 2016

Roman landscapes in drawings by Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain
Christ and the Magdalene in a landscape
1678
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Pastoral landscape
ca. 1636-37
drawing
British Museum

                                                            There was a valley thicke
With Pinaple and Cipresse trees that armed be with pricke.
Gargaphie hight this shadie plot, it was a sacred place
To chaste Diana and the Nymphes that wayted on hir grace.
Within the furthest end thereof there was a pleasant Bowre
So vaulted with the leavie trees, the Sunne had there no powre:
Nor made by hand nor mans devise, and yet no man alive,
A trimmer piece of worke than that could for  his life contrive.
With flint and Pommy was it wallde by nature halfe about,
And on the right side of the same full freshly flowed out
A lively spring with Christall streame: whereof the upper brim
Was greene with grasse and matted herbes that smelled verie trim.

 from Arthur Golding's 1567 translation into English of Ovid's Metamorphoses
Claude Lorrain
Landscape with large-leaved plants
ca. 1669
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Temptation of Christ
1676
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Trees
ca. 1640-45
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Trees on a bank
1650s
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Claude Lorrain
Trees
ca. 1660
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Trees
ca. 1638
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Pastoral landscape
ca. 1667
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Pastoral landscape
ca. 1655-65
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Landscape with figures
ca. 1635
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Roman statue
ca. 1635-40
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
View from La Crescenza
1662
drawing
British Museum

Claude Lorrain
Monte Mario & the Tiber
ca. 1640
drawing
British Museum

" . . . a world in which classical structures and ancient ruins are intermingled with a poetically idealized, eternally unchanging idea of the life of the land, of the sort that gives Claude Lorrain's landscapes, illumined by the golden light of the forever contemporary Roman campagna, their own satisfying feel of timelessness, and the sense that it really doesn't matter whether we are witness to a dance of the Satyrs or to a rural wedding celebration."

– from Nicolas Poussin : Friendship and the Love of Painting by Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey (Princeton University Press, 1996)