Landscape with St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch

This Landscape with St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch, around 1678, at the National Museum Cardiff, is a late masterwork combining the biblical narrative with Claude's most refined atmospheric effects. The late works achieve an almost ethereal luminosity as if the physical landscape were dissolving into pure light. Claude Lorrain, born in Lorraine but active in Rome from the 1620s until his death in 1682, was the most influential landscape painter in the history of European art. His vision of the Mediterranean landscape — organized by the principles of classical composition, suffused with the golden light of the Roman campagna, populated by figures from the classical and biblical traditions — defined the ideal landscape for two centuries of European painting and garden design. His influence on the English landscape garden of the eighteenth century (gardens literally designed to look like Claude paintings), on Turner's early work, and on the entire tradition of ideal landscape makes him a cultural force beyond any other landscape painter in European history.

The biblical scene takes place beside a river in a vast landscape that extends to a luminous horizon. Claude's late palette of cool silvers and warm golds creates a transcendent atmosphere of otherworldly beauty.