Claude Lorrain

(b Chamagne (Vosges), France, 1600; d Rome, 1682) French painter. Lorrain is one of the most enduringly admired and imitated landscape painters of the western tradition. His compositions have inspired artists as diverse as Turner and Vernet. He was patronized and later collected by the international elite- popes, cardinals, princes and kings- on a scale that was rivaled in his day only by Rubens and van Dyck. Working for most of his life in Rome, Lorrain eschewed the earlier, somewhat drier, landscape style of his master Agostino Tassi and other contemporaries such as the Fleming Paulus Bril and, under the influence of the Carracci school-- particularly Domenichino-- reinvented the idealized, Arcadian landscape. Using drawings taken from nature, in which he anticipated the painters of both the Barbizon and Impressionist schools, Lorrain was able to compose his landscapes with great naturalism, making revolutionary use of light and dark, form and space, to create idealized pictures which represented a nature that was more perfect than nature itself. (Credit: Sotheby’s, New York, Important Old Master Paintings, January 26, 2006, lot 51)