_Claude Lorraine_ (French: 1600-1682). _See_ 2.
David, in front of the cave, "longed and said, 'Oh that one would give
me to drink of the water of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!' And the
three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines (seen in the
valley), and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the
gate, and took it, and brought it to David" (2 Samuel xxiii. 15, 16).
With regard to the landscape, the picture is a good instance at once
of Claude's strength and weakness. Thus "the central group of trees is
a very noble piece of painting" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii.
sec. iv. ch. ii. § 8). On the other hand the rocks, both in the left
corner and in the right, are highly absurd. "The Claudesque landscape
is not, as so commonly supposed, an idealised abstract of the nature
about Rome. It is an ultimate condition of the Florentine conventional
landscape, more or less softened by reference to nature" (_ibid._,
vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 27). So, too, "the brown foreground and
rocks are as false as colour can be: first, because there never was
such a brown sunlight, for even the sand and cinders (volcanic tufa)
about Naples, granting that he had studied from these ugliest of all
formations, are, where they are fresh fractured, golden and lustrous
in full light, compared to these ideals of crags, and become, like all
other rocks, quiet and gray when weathered; and secondly, because no
rock that ever nature stained is without its countless breaking tints
of varied vegetation" (_ibid._, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 16).