_Claude Lorraine_ (French: 1600-1682).
Claude Gellée was the son of humble parents, and to the end he
was an unlettered man. He was born in the village of Champagne,
in the Vosges, Duchy of Lorraine, and thence acquired the name
of _Le Lorrain_. Lineal descendants of Claude's brother still
live in the village, and the house in which he was born is
now preserved as a museum of relics of the painter. He was
brought up, it is said, as a pastry-cook, but he entered the
household of Agostino Tassi, a Perugian landscape painter, at
Rome, in the capacity of general factotum, cooking his master's
meals and grinding his colours. From him Claude received his
first instruction in art. Subsequently he travelled to the
Tyrol and to Venice--the influence of which place may be seen
in the "gentle ripples of waveless seas" in his Seaports.
After working for some time at Nancy, the capital of Lorraine,
he returned in October 1627 to Rome, and there settled down
for the remainder of his life. The house which he inhabited
may still be seen at the angle of the streets Sistina and
Gregoriana. Of his life at Rome many interesting particulars
are given by his friend Sandrart, a German painter, who was for
some years his companion. "In order," says Sandrart, "that he
might be able to study closely the innermost secrets of nature,
he used to linger in the open air from before daybreak even to
nightfall, so that he might learn to depict with a scrupulous
adherence to nature's model the changing phases of dawn, the
rising and setting sun, as well as the hours of twilight....
In this most difficult and toilsome mode of study he spent
many years; making excursions into the country every day, and
returning even after a long journey without finding it irksome.
Sometimes I have chanced to meet him amongst the steepest
cliffs at Tivoli, handling the brush before those well-known
waterfalls, and painting the actual scene, not by the aid of
imagination or invention, but according to the very objects
which nature placed before him."[39] (One of these sketches
is now in the British Museum.) On one expedition to Tivoli,
Claude was accompanied, we know, by Poussin, but for the most
part he lived a secluded life; "he did not," says Sandrart, "in
everyday life much affect the civilities of polite society."
Such seclusion must partly have been necessary to enable
Claude to cope with the commissions that crowded in upon him.
For the Pope Urban VIII. he painted the four pictures now in
the Louvre, and the three succeeding popes were all among his
patrons. So was Cardinal Mazarin and the Duke of Bouillon, the
Papal Commander-in-Chief, for whom amongst other pictures he
painted two (12 and 14) in this Gallery. England was a great
buyer of his works: nineteen were ordered from here in 1644
alone; and commissions came also from Denmark and the Low
Countries. One sees the pressure of a busy man in the number
of "stock" subjects which he repeated. He suffered much too
from forgers, and it was partly to check the sale of fictitious
Claudes that he prepared his "Liber Veritatis"--a collection
of drawings of all his pictures, now in the possession of
the Duke of Devonshire. Two hundred and seventy more of his
drawings may be seen in the British Museum. For his figures,
however, he was glad of outside help, and many painters put
these in for him. The soft, pensive, and almost feminine charm
which characterises his landscapes well agree with what we know
of his life. He was passionately fond of music. To a little
girl, "living with me and brought up in my house in charity,"
he bequeathed much of his treasures. He had received also a
poor, lame lad into his house, whom he instructed in painting
and music, and who rewarded him by demanding arrears of salary
for "assistance." Towards his poor relations he was uniformly
generous, and when Sandrart left him it was a nephew from the
Vosges whom he called to keep house for him.
With regard to the characteristics of Claude's art, his general
position in the history of landscape painting has been defined
in the chapter on the French School, and some further points
of detail are noticed under his several works. Here, however,
it may be convenient to give Ruskin's summary of the matter.
(1) Claude had a fine feeling for beauty of form, and is seldom
ungraceful in his foliage. His tenderness of conception is
especially shown in delicate aerial effects, such as no one
had ever rendered before, and in some respects, no one has
ever done in oil-colour since. But their character appears to
rise rather from a delicacy of bodily constitution in Claude
than from any mental sensibility; such as they are, they give
a kind of feminine charm to his work, which partly accounts
for its wide influence. To whatever their character may be
traced, it renders him incapable of enjoying or painting
anything energetic or terrible. Thus a perfectly genuine and
untouched sky of Claude is beyond praise in all qualities of
air. But he was incapable of rendering great effects of space
and infinity. (2) As with his skies, so too with his seas.
They are the finest pieces of water painting in ancient art.
But they are selections of the particular moment when the
sea is most insipid and characterless. (3) He had sincerity
of purpose; but in common with the other landscape painters
of his day, neither earnestness, humility, nor love, such
as would ever cause him to forget himself. Hence there is
in his work no simple or honest record of any single truth,
and his pictures, when examined with reference to essential
truth, are one mass of error from beginning to end. So far as
he felt the truth, he tried to be true; but he never felt it
enough to sacrifice supposed propriety, or habitual method,
to it. Very few of his sketches and none of his pictures show
evidence of interest in other natural phenomena than the
quiet afternoon sunshine which would fall methodically into a
composition.[40] One would suppose he had never seen scarlet
in a morning cloud, nor a storm burst on the Apennines. (4)
He shows a peculiar incapacity of understanding the main
point of a matter, and of men of name is the best instance
of a want of imagination, nearly total, borne out by painful
but untaught study of nature, and much feeling for abstract
beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of expression.
(5) Yet in spite of all his deficiencies Claude effected a
revolution in art. This revolution consisted in setting the
sun in heaven. We will give him the credit of this with no
drawbacks.[41] Till Claude's time no one had seriously thought
of painting the sun but conventionally; that is so say, as a
red or yellow star (often), with a face in it, under which
type it was constantly represented in illumination; else it
was kept out of the picture, or introduced in fragmentary
distances, breaking through clouds with almost definite rays.
Claude first set it in the pictorial heaven (collected from
_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3, 5,
14, sec. iii. ch. i. § 9, ch. iii. §§ 13-15, 17; vol. ii. pt.
iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. §§ 22,
27, and Appendix i.; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. v. §§ 10, 11). This
summary should show that it is a mistake to represent Ruskin
as blind to the merits of Claude. He has done full justice
to Claude's amenity and pensive grace; to the beauty of his
skies and the skill and charm of his aerial effects. At the
time when Ruskin began to write _Modern Painters_, Claude was
still accounted the prince of all landscape painters. The
estimate of Claude against which Ruskin protested may be found
in Goethe. "Claude Lorraine," he said, "knew the real world
thoroughly, even to its smallest detail, and he made use of it
to express the world contained in his own beautiful soul. He
stands to nature in a double relation,--he is both her slave
and her master: her slave, by the material means which he is
obliged to employ to make himself understood; her master,
because he subordinates these material means to a well reasoned
inspiration, to which he makes them serve as instruments."
And elsewhere, Goethe expresses his admiration for the depth
and grasp of Claude's powers. Ruskin, in vindicating the
greater sweep and depth of Turner's genius, fastened with all
the emphasis of an advocate upon the weak points in Claude's
artistic and intellectual armoury. By so doing he cleared the
ground for a truer appreciation of Claude. As a corrective
or supplement to Ruskin's adverse criticisms, the reader may
be referred to Constable's enthusiastic appreciations. "I
do not wonder," wrote Constable to his wife, "at you being
jealous of Claude. If anything could come between our love,
it is him.... The Claudes, the Claudes are all, all, I can
think of here" (Leslie's _Life of Constable_, 1845, p. 121).
Constable was writing from Sir George Beaumont's house, where
several of the Claudes, now in the National Gallery, were then
hanging. Constable, however, was alive to some of Claude's
defects. "Claude's exhilaration and light," he wrote to Leslie,
"departed from him when he was between fifty and sixty, and he
then became a professor of the 'higher walks of art,' and fell
in a great degree into the manner of the painters around him;
so difficult is it to be natural, so easy to be superior in
our own opinion. When we have the pleasure of being together
at the National Gallery I think I shall not find it difficult
to illustrate these remarks, as Carr has sent a large picture
of the latter description" (_ibid._, p. 221). The picture in
question is No. 6, painted in 1658.
For the story of Cephalus, who is here receiving from Procris the
presents of Diana, the hound Lelaps, and the fatal dart with which
she was killed, see under 698. As for the landscape, Mr. Ruskin cites
this picture as an instance of the "childishness and incompetence" of
Claude's foregrounds.
"I will not," he writes, "say anything of the agreeable composition
of the three banks, rising one behind another from the water, except
only that it amounts to a demonstration that all three were painted
in the artist's study, without any reference to nature whatever. In
fact, there is quite enough intrinsic evidence in each of them to
prove this, seeing that what appears to be meant for vegetation upon
them amounts to nothing more than a green stain on their surfaces,
the more evidently false because the leaves of the trees twenty yards
farther off are all perfectly visible and distinct; and that the sharp
lines with which each cuts against that beyond it are not only such
as crumbling earth could never show or assume, but are maintained
through their whole progress ungraduated, unchanging, and unaffected
by any of the circumstances of varying shade to which every one of
nature's lines is inevitably subjected. In fact the whole arrangement
is the impotent struggle of a tyro to express by successive edges that
approach of earth which he finds himself incapable of expressing by the
drawing of the surface. Claude wished to make you understand that the
edge of his pond came nearer and nearer; he had probably often tried to
do this with an unbroken bank, or a bank only varied by the delicate
and harmonious anatomy of nature: and he had found that owing to his
total ignorance of the laws of perspective such efforts on his part
invariably ended in his reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and
making it look perpendicular. Much comfort and solace of mind in such
unpleasant circumstances may be derived from instantly dividing the
obnoxious bank into a number of successive promontories, and developing
their edges with completeness and intensity" (_Modern Painters_, vol.
i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. iv. §§ 17, 18).