Landscape

Claude Lorrain's landscapes transformed European painting's relationship to light and atmosphere. This landscape from about 1641 at York Art Gallery dates from Claude's maturity in Rome, where the French-born artist spent most of his career painting idealized views of the Italian countryside suffused with golden light for an international clientele of collectors and diplomats. 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.

Claude's signature golden light suffuses the composition, with carefully graduated atmospheric perspective leading the eye from foreground trees through a luminous middle distance to a hazy horizon.