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)