Landscape with the Holy Family and Saint John the Baptist
Provenance
Private Collection, Normandy; sold at
Bonham’s, Paris, Collections of the Contents of Two French Castles, 20 March 2024, lot 13; acquired by
Private Collection, Paris
This charming painting is among Claude Lorrain’s earliest works. Born in eastern France, Claude settled permanently in Rome in 1627 going on to become the leading landscape painter in Italy and indeed all Europe. From 1622–25 he worked in the studio of the landscape and marine artist Agostino Tassi in Rome and then travelled to Naples with the Flemish landscape painter Goffredo Wals. All three artists were much influenced by the work of Adam Elsheimer, a German painter in Rome in the first decade of the 17th century and a much greater talent than Tassi or Wals. Elsheimer painted landscape and figure subjects which showed the impact of northern landscape painting, the Venetian late 16th century, the Roman high renaissance and the early baroque of the Carracci. He worked on a small scale, very often on copper. He was a close friend of Rubens and became a leading pioneer of the new realism in Italian painting.
Among Elsheimer’s best known works was the Aurora, which shows the dawn light spreading out from behind a wooded hillside (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, GG 550; fig. 1). Here the effulgent luminosity for which Claude became so famous is already on stage. Claude never saw the Aurora since it was taken back to Germany by Elsheimer’s associate Hendrick Goudt long before Claude came south but Goudt made a fine print after it which enhanced its fame. Claude’s stamping ground was the countryside around Rome and the present early landscape resembles the Aurora in the level clouds in the sky though the morning light is more diffuse and a little later in the day. Similar clouds appear in another early morning Claude dated 1629 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1952.5.44; fig. 2), showing merchants with barges by a river estuary. This is on canvas and much larger and has a more open formal composition which anticipates Claude’s later grand manner. Another early Claude in the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, again has a structured layout but the atmospheric treatment of the hills is like the present work as is the strong green palette (1980.0031; fig. 3).The bushy trees favoured by Claude at this period are similar to those in a number of Elsheimer’s later landscapes, for example the so called ‘large Tobias’ in the Copenhagen museum and the Latona in Wallraf-Richartz museum in Cologne.
A more important point is the extent to which the Claude already demonstrates a fidelity to nature which was to contribute to the vitality of even the grandest of his later works. Claude was one of the greatest of all landscape draftsmen and his earlier drawings form the first and largest body of plein air work in the Western canon. He is also said to have done oil studies in the Roman countryside, though none have survived from this period. The composition of the Claude, with the open foreground, the copse and the ridge beyond dotted with trees, does seem topographically specific and is not unlike a plein air oil sketch made nearly two centuries later by Heinrich Reinhold of the Serpentara at Olevano, near the Sabine mountains east of Rome (Kunsthalle, Hamburg, HK-1420; fig. 4). Reinhold was one of a colony of German artists from the wider circle of expatriate plein air artists working in the Campagna, which included Corot. However, the area of water far left suggests the Claude might instead be a view, (looking south because of the morning light) on the Tiber north of Rome, a common subject for Claude as a draftsman. A sketch on the Tiber by the French early 19th century artist François-Marius Granet gives an idea of this type of scenery.[1] Since on copper, the Claude is unlikely to have been painted on site but done from memory, with the tree on the right inserted as a repoussoir to frame the prospect, a frequent Claudian device. Whatever the case, this copper could arguably be Claude’s earliest known topographical painting, preceding slightly later views from the 1630’s like the Trinita dei Monti (London, The National Gallery, NG1319; fig. 5) and the Vigna Madama (London, British Museum, Oo,7.224). Particularly evocative are the trees on the horizon line, which as in the Reinhold, presage a wider world with greater spaces opening out beyond this lush, green and secluded valley.
In the 1630s Claude went on to paint other small landscapes on copper, maybe intended for the open market. Notable examples are a Rest on the Flight in the Duke of Westminster collection, and another of the same subject belonging to the Duke of Rutland. The Westminster picture is signed and dated 1631 and the Rutland picture, though lacking signature and date, must be from around the same time. Both were acquired in the 18th century. Like the present work they reflect Claude’s admiration for Elsheimer in their intimate atmosphere and setting, with the stronger contrasts of light and shade typical of his predecessor which Claude developed early in that decade. The Rutland picture indeed entered the collection as an Elsheimer.❖
Ian Kennedy