Painting a scene from nature – a landscape – seems such a natural thing to do in art that we don’t even think of it as an idea, really. Certainly not something that had to be justified, or fought for, as a legitimate genre.
And yet, Western artists produced few pure landscapes before the 1600s, and artistic giants such as Michelangelo considered them a waste of time. The Chinese had for centuries glorified their craggy mountains and twisty rivers, but most Western artists tended to treat nature as a backdrop for religious stories or mythical narratives.
“Landscape with Shepherds” is typical of Claude Lorrain’s pastoral ideal.
Gradually, especially in the work of Northern artists such as Bruegel, landscape came into its own. The figures trudging through the snow or harvesting the wheat became smaller and less consequential and the landscape elements became more dominant.
But it was only in the hands of a French artist, Claude Lorrain, that landscape painting became a complete form of expression.
Claude, as he is called today, was born Claude Gellee in about 1600. He spent most of his career in and around Rome. His works have always been much sought after, and hence, most of his 250 surviving paintings remain in European collections, although one of his greatest, “The Sermon on the Mount,” was acquired by New York’s Frick Museum in 1960.
But Claude also left about 1,300 drawings, several dozen of which were bought by the turn-of-the-century American financier J. Pierpont Morgan and can be seen in a show at the Morgan Library that celebrates the 400th anniversary of Claude’s birth. On display are about 40 works – some drawn from other New York collections – which range from partially finished sketches, apparently done outdoors, to highly polished works that were meant to stand on their own.
Landscape painting as we know it today was essentially invented by Claude and another French expatriate artist based in Rome, Nicolas Poussin. Both Claude and Poussin were inspired by the Italian countryside, or campagna, with its soft contours and broad expanses dotted with romantic ruins.
Poussin, however, was the classicist. His landscapes are geometric constructions with grand themes drawn from classical antiquity.
Claude was the romantic. He, too, used literary and mythical themes, but with him the subjects are mere token efforts, the figures often small or insignificant. All the emotion and expressiveness comes directly from the place itself.
The subject of “Landscape With Aeneas and Achates Hunting the Stag,” for example, may be the mythical Roman hero, but the true heroes of the picture are the trees and the sky. In this, as in many of his drawings, Claude framed his picture with screens of dark trees to the left and right, making stage-like wings that intensify the central light. In “Aeneas,” a tall tree rises up in the center, as gestural as a bouquet or a spray from a fountain.
There is always a sweet melancholy in Claude’s work, a feeling of twilight, of the transience of everything. The actions of the satyrs or biblical characters are secondary; the mood of their actions – be it playful, lazy, or heroic – is dwarfed by nature’s larger mood.
For Claude, man was not the measure of all things. He is small, and there is something comforting in that smallness. Even in “The Sermon on the Mount,” we can barely make out Christ among the gathering beneath the clump of trees on the odd hillock. He is probably the one with his arm raised. But no matter. Claude conveys the power of his message not with facial expressions and theatrics, but through the calm majesty of nature.
Pierpont Morgan Library
2000
