Another French artist who spent his career in Rome was Claude Lorrain
(1600–1682). He was born Claude Gellée, near Nancy in Lorraine, in France.
His family name is rarely used in English, and he is never called Lorrain; the
artist is referred to as Claude Lorrain or, simply, Claude. According to an
early biographer, Claude was trained as a pastry chef, but by about age 13, he
was in Italy working as a general studio assistant for painters. He settled in
Rome for good around 1627 and, within 10 years, had a secure reputation as
a landscape painter. Indeed, Claude virtually reinvented landscape painting,
giving it a formula, varied with growing subtlety and imagination, that was
to become the principal pictorial approach to painting landscape for the next
two centuries.
Our ¿ rst example of Claude’s work is the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca
(The Mill) (1648). Note the framing of the landscape by two groups of trees.
One group obscures the Sun, the source of light, which glides across the
landscape. In the distance, the hills are blue. Claude’s subtle device of the
framing became the standard for 200 years. In the same year that Poussin
painted Eliezer and Rebecca, Claude painted this Rebecca. Were it not for
an inscription on the painting, however, we would be unlikely to know the
subject of the Claude; indeed, it was long known under the title The Mill.
There is no literary or artistic tradition of a dance being held to celebrate
the marriage of Rebecca and Isaac, but biblical commentators always
stressed its joyousness. This depiction has a serene beauty, especially the
verdure of the foreground and the trees. Our eyes are gently guided into this
nuanced landscape.
Late in life, Claude painted Landscape with Aeneas at Delos (1672). This is
a noble picture, one of six paintings showing stories of Aeneas, the founder
of Rome. The work was inspired by Virgil’s epic but also probably by Ovid,
who recounts some of the story in descriptive terms more clearly echoed by
Claude in this work. The group of paintings is unusual in that the subjects
Claude chose from the Aeneid had never before been illustrated. This scene
was the ¿ rst of those Claude painted. Aeneas, in red; his father, Anchises,
in blue; and the younger son, Ascanius, have arrived at Delos, the city of
Apollo, having À ed Troy, taking with them the sacred images of the gods,.
They are received by the priest/king Anius, in white, who showed them the
city, the new shrines, and the sacred trees under which Apollo and Diana