Pastoral Landscape, 1639
Pen and brown ink and wash, over black chalk, heightened with white (partly oxidized), 9 1/16 x 13 in. (23 x 33 cm)
James W. Fosburgh, B.A. 1933, and Mary C. Fosburgh Collection Fund
1981.108
Claude Lorrain was the leading French landscape painter and draftsman of the seventeenth century. He spent nearly his entire career in Rome where, under the influence of ancient art, his fellow painters, and his highly educated patrons, he developed a style of landscape that combined close observation of nature with the classical manner, as seen in Pastoral Landscape. Typical of Claude’s works, the drawing has a tightly structured space—the silhouetted foreground giving way to a broad, bright distance—rendered poetic by the artist’s ink washes. This drawing comes from the so-called Wildenstein Album, a set of sixty drawings assembled around the year 1700 that represented the highest aspect of Claude’s draftsmanship.
 |
 |
 |