Claude Lorrain short biography. Claude Lorrain

With minor additions, Lorrain followed this type of landscape all his life, but he enriched it with such direct and original observations, thanks to which, over the centuries, new solutions appeared in the genre of idyllic landscape - primarily in the construction of a continuously integral space filled with light. Claude Lorrain introduced the practice of drawing landscapes from life using pen and watercolor. Claude sensitively captured the expanse of the Roman Campania, carefully studying natural motifs - trees covered with ivy, paths on which light and shadow fall. He comprehended a new language for expressing emotions, the “words” of which he found in the natural environment.

Only Rembrandt followed a similar path at that time, who in the same years made landscape sketches while wandering around the outskirts of Amsterdam. However, Claude set out to breathe new life into the old scheme in another rather original way. He went out of the city in the morning and in the evening and, observing in nature tonal transitions from the middle ground to the farthest, he created a color scheme by mixing colors on the palette. Then he returned to the studio to use the painting found in the appropriate places on the easel. Using tonal color and matching it with nature were both completely new techniques at the time. They allowed Claude to solve the problem he set with unprecedented, sometimes naive openness. Claude's idyllic landscape was the only genre that artists from English-speaking countries adopted and made it their own. It was this impulse, together with direct observation of nature, that allowed them to make a great contribution to the art of landscape and contributed to the renewal of this genre in the 19th century.

Painting by Claude Lorrain “Landscape with the Sacrifice to Apollo.”
This majestic, spatial landscape is one of the best examples of classical landscape painting. It is carefully composed, powerful verticals and horizontals balance each other, and the alternation of light and shadow helps the viewer’s gaze move along and into the depth of the composition. Claude Lorrain managed to convey the solemn grandeur of the Roman Campagna. The color scheme, based on a skillful combination of shades of green, blue and brown, creates a feeling of transparency in the atmosphere. The human figures seem almost random in this majestic setting, representing a plot from classical mythology in which Psyche's father, making a sacrifice to Apollo, asks him to find a husband for his daughter. Claude Lorrain was French, but spent his entire life in Rome. His pastoral compositions and poetic vision were a constant source of inspiration for English landscape painters of the 18th and 19th centuries. Seeing the landscape reproduced here, Turner noted that it “surpasses the power of imitation in painting.” Claude Lorrain died on November 23, 1682 in Rome.

Claude Lorrain (French: Claude Lorrain; 1600-1682).

Claude Lorrain (French Claude Lorrain; real name - Gellee or Jelly (Gellee, Gelee); 1600, Chamagne, near Mirecourt, Lorraine - November 23, 1682, Rome) - a famous French painter and engraver of landscapes.

Claude Laurent was born in 1600 in the then independent Duchy of Lorraine into a peasant family. He was left an orphan early. Having received initial knowledge of drawing from his elder brother, a skilled wood engraver in Freiburg, in Breisgau, in 1613-14. he went with one of his relatives to Italy. While working as a servant in the house of the landscape artist Agostino Tassi, he learned some technical techniques and skills. From 1617 to 1621, Lorrain lived in Naples, studied perspective and architecture with Gottfried Wels, and improved in landscape painting under the guidance of Agostino Tassi, one of P. Briel’s students, in Rome, where Lorrain’s entire life was spent after that, with the exception of two years (1625 -27), when Lorrain returns to his homeland and lives in Nancy. Here he decorates the vault of the church and paints architectural backgrounds in commissioned works by Claude Deruet, court painter of the Duke of Lorraine. In 1627, Lorrain again left for Italy and settled in Rome. There he lives until his death (1627-1682). At first he carried out custom decorative work, the so-called. "landscape frescoes", but later he managed to become a professional "landscape painter" and concentrate on easel works. In addition, Lorrain was an excellent etcher; He left etching only in 1642, finally choosing painting.

In 1637, the French ambassador to the Vatican bought two paintings from Lorrain, which are now in the Louvre: “View of the Roman Forum” and “View of the port with the Capitol.” In 1639, the Spanish King Philip IV commissioned Lorren seven works (now in the Prado Museum), of which two were landscapes with hermits. Among other customers, it is necessary to mention Pope Urban VIII (4 works), Cardinal Bentivoglio, Prince Colonna.


The Rape of Europa. 1667. London. Royal Collection

During the Baroque era, landscape was considered a secondary genre. Lorren, however, receives recognition and lives in abundance. He rents a large, three-story house in the center of the capital, not far from Plaza de España (since 1650); since 1634 he has been a member of the Academy of St. Luke (i.e. art academy). Later, in 1650, he was offered to become the rector of this Academy, an honor Lorrain refused, preferring quiet work. He communicates with artists, in particular with N. Poussin, a neighbor whom he visits often in the 1660s to drink a glass of good red wine with him.
Lorrain was not married, but had a daughter, Agnes, born in 1653. He bequeathed all his property to her. Lorrain died in Rome in 1682.

Lorrain’s last work, “Landscape with Oskanius Shooting a Deer” (Museum in Oxford), was completed in the year of the artist’s death, and is considered a true masterpiece.


Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of the Sibyl, 1682. Oxford. Ashmolean Museum


Landscape with the Finding of Moses.1638. Prado


Judgment of Paris. 1645-1646. Washington. National Gallery


The Rape of Europa. 1655. Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin

Other pictures are clickable*

The Departure of the Queen of Sheba.1648.National Gallery, London


“Sea harbor at sunrise” 1674. Old Pinakothek.


"Harbor with Villa Medici"


"Landscape with Shepherds (Pastoral)"




“View of Delphi with a procession of pilgrims” Rome, Doria Pamphili Gallery


"Siege of La Rochelle by the troops of Louis XIII"


"Egeria Mourning Numa"


"Landscape with the Penitent Magdalene"



"Landscape with Apollo, Muses and River Deity" 1652 National Gallery of Scotland



View of the Roman Campagna from Tivoli, evening (1644-5)


"Landscape with David and Three Heroes"


"Easter Morning"


"Worship of the Golden Calf"




“Landscape with the nymph Egeria and King Numa” 1669.Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte.


"Landscape with a Shepherd and Goats" 1636. London, National Gallery



“Landscape with Apollo and Mercury” 1645 Rome, Doria-Pamphilj gallery


"The Departure of St. Paul to Ostia"


“Odysseus hands over Chryseis to her father” 1648 Paris, Louvre


"Village Dance"


"The Arrival of Cleopatra at Tarsa" 1642, Louvre


"The Expulsion of Hagar"


"Acis and Galatea"


"Campo Vaccino"


"The Departure of St. Ursula"


"Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah"


“Reconciliation of Cephalus and Procris” 1645 London, National Gallery


“Aeneas on the Island of Delos” 1672 London, National Gallery


"Shepherd"


"Villa in Roman Campania"


"Flight into Egypt"

Claude Lorrain (1600, Champagne - 1682, Rome), real name Claude Jelle, also nicknamed Lorrain, a resident of Lorraine. Around 1613 he moved to Rome, where he became a student of the architect Agostino Tassi. From 1619 to 1624 he continued his studies in Naples with the master of urban landscape Gottfried Waltz, then went to France for two years. In 1634 he was accepted as a member of the Roman Academy, and soon became a leading landscape artist. In his works he focuses on the idyllic landscapes of Annibale Carracci and Dutch artists living in Rome. Then the painting of Nicolas Poussin became closer to him. However, in contrast to his manner of depicting heroic landscapes, Lorrain develops his own lyrical-realistic style. The work of these artists is the pinnacle of mature Roman Baroque painting.

Famous paintings

Arrival of Cleopatra in Tarsos, circa 1642. Oil on canvas, 117*148 cm Louvre Museum, Paris.
In the 40s, Lorrain devoted more and more space in his works to historical, mythological and biblical subjects, which often served only as a pretext for creating a composition. This piece, with its panoramic view of the port, offers views of the distant horizon. Buildings built according to the models of ancient architects seem unreal, as do people working or engaged in conversation.

Landscape with Apollo and Mercury, circa 1643. Oil on canvas, 55*45 cm, Doria Pamphili Gallery, Rome.
The painting depicts the mythical legend about the abduction of Admetus' flock by the gods. Captivated by music, Apollo does not notice how the cunning Mercury steals away his herd. Apollo's enthusiastic mood is expressively conveyed through a landscape permeated with light. Only in a few works of other creators did the artistic theory of the Baroque - painting as silent poetry - find such a vivid and complete reflection as in this lyrical canvas by Lorrain.

Claude Lorrain. Famous landscapes. updated: January 27, 2018 by: Gleb

Claude Lorrain (real name - Jelle or Jelly; 1600, Chamagne, near Mirecourt, Lorraine - November 23, 1682, Rome) - French painter and engraver, one of the greatest masters of classical landscape.

Biography of Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain was born in 1600 in the Duchy of Lorraine into a peasant family. The future master of classical landscapes first became involved in drawing thanks to his older brother, who was a fairly skilled wood engraver.

Little Claude was barely thirteen years old when, accompanied by one of his distant relatives, he went to Italy, where he spent almost the rest of his life.

Lorrain's work

The boy began his path to great painting by becoming a servant in the house of the Roman landscape artist Agostino Tassi. Here he received a lot of necessary knowledge in technology.

From 1617 to 1621, Claude lived in Naples, as a student of Gottfried Wels, and there is no doubt that this period left an indelible imprint on the artist's future work.

It was here that the young Lorrain became interested in depicting sea and coastal landscapes, and this genre in the future occupied a significant place in his creative heritage.

Returning to Rome, Claude again appeared in the house of Agostino Tassi, now as one of the best students.

At twenty-five, Claude briefly returned to his homeland, where he helped paint cathedrals for Claude Deruet, the court artist of the Duke of Lorraine.

From 1627 until the end of his days, the artist lived in Rome.

For some time he performed landscape frescoes to order, decorating cathedrals and mansions. But gradually he focused more and more on easel painting, and often spent day after day in the open air, depicting his favorite landscapes and architectural views.

Images of people came to him, if not with difficulty, then certainly without inspiration. The rare figures of characters on his canvases play a purely auxiliary role, and in most cases they were painted not by himself, but by his assistants, friends or students.

During this period, Lorrain mastered the technique of etching and reached quite decent heights, but by the early forties he gradually lost interest in this technique and completely focused on landscape painting.

Since the 30s, he began to have very prominent customers: first the French ambassador to the papal court, then the Spanish King Philip IV, and a little later, Pope Urban VIII himself.

Claude became fashionable and popular, and the demand for his works was constantly growing.

The artist became wealthy; he rented a three-story mansion in the center of Rome, next door to another outstanding artist, Nicolas Poussin.

Throughout his life, Claude Lorrain was never married, but in 1653 his daughter Agnes was born, and it was she who, after the artist’s death in 1682, inherited all his property.

Artist's works

• "Sea Harbor" (c. 1636), Louvre
• “Landscape with Apollo and Marsyas” (c. 1639), A. S. Pushkin Museum
• "The Departure of St. Ursula" (1646), London, National Gallery
• "Landscape with Acis and Galatea" (1657), Dresden
• “Afternoon” (Rest on the Flight to Egypt) (1661), Hermitage
• "Evening" (Tobias and the Angel) (1663), Hermitage
• "Morning" (Jacob and Laban's daughters) (1666), Hermitage
• "Night" (Jacob's Wrestling with the Angel) (1672), Hermitage
• "View of the shore of Delos with Aeneas" (1672), London, National Gallery
• "Ascanius Hunting Silvina's Stag" (1682), Oxford, Ashmolean Museum
• "Landscape with dancing satyrs and nymphs" (1646), Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art
• “Landscape with Acis and Galatea” from the Dresden Art Gallery is one of F. M. Dostoevsky’s favorite paintings; its description is contained, in particular, in the novel “Demons”.

Claude Lorrain's creative career spans almost a century. His early works date from the late 1620s, and his style underwent significant changes during his lifetime. At the beginning of his career, Lorrain painted small works with pastoral figures on canvas or copper, then ports with the setting sun. Over time, under the influence of classical artists, his compositions become larger and larger, with literary subjects. In the later period, the artist’s works became more and more intimate in nature and were distinguished by a very delicate texture. Often these are illustrations of Virgil's Aeneid.

There is very little information about the artist’s childhood. He was born into a peasant family in Lorraine, hence his nickname - Lorraine (in French - Lorraine). He received his first drawing lessons from his brother Jean Jelle, a woodcarver. At the age of 13, in 1613, Claude arrived in Italy, where he would spend 10 years of his life. First he becomes the servant of the artist Cavalier Arpino, then Agostino Tassi. Together with Tassi and the German landscape painter Gottfried Waltz, he worked in Naples in 1618-20, then in Rome. Not a single work of the painter created during this period of his life has survived.

In 1625, Lorrain returned to Lorraine through Venice and Bavaria, where he worked as an assistant to Claude Deruet, performing frescoes in Nancy. But a year later, in 1627, he returned to Rome. Since then, Italy has become his new homeland.

The first painting that has survived to this day, “Landscape with a Herd and a Peasant,” dates back to 1629. From 1630, he began to keep a catalog of his paintings, where he wrote down each painting, even recording the name of the buyer. In this way he documented almost 200 of his works over a period of 50 years.

In 1629-35, Claude Lorrain painted frescoes in the Palazzo Crescenzi and Palazzo Muti, and in the late 1630s. the painter becomes one of the leading landscape masters of Rome. In 1633 Claude was admitted to the Academy of St. Luke, in 1643 - in the Congregation dei Virtuosi, and is also a member of the Club of Migratory Birds, a community of foreign artists in Rome, where he received the guild nickname “fire worshiper” for his passion for depicting sunlight.

His closest friends were Nicolas Poussin and Pieter van Laer, with whom he usually went to sketch outside the city walls. Many artists who arrived in Rome lived for a long time in Lorrain's house, among them his first biographer Joachim von Sandrart and the Dutch landscape painter Hermann van Swanevelt.

Claude's inspirations in the field of landscape painting were Annibale Carracci and representatives of the Bolognese school - the Dutchman Paul Brill, the German Adam Elsheimer. Guided by the thought of the originally rational organization of the world, revealed in the eternal beauty and eternal laws of nature, Lorrain strives to create his own ideally beautiful image of it. The artist studied the laws of pictorial relationships of nature in such detail that he could create his landscapes with any combination of trees, water, buildings, and sky. Lorrain lay from early morning until late at night under the open sky, trying to understand how to most plausibly paint the dawn at dawn and at sunset, and when he managed to catch what he was looking for, he immediately tempered his colors according to what he saw, ran home with them and applied them to the picture he conceived, achieving the highest truthfulness, unknown before him.

His skill reached such heights that for another two centuries his paintings were role models for artists.

There are many famous buyers of Lorrain's paintings. One of them was the French ambassador to the Vatican, who bought from Lorrain in 1637 two paintings that are now in the Louvre: “View of the Roman Forum” and “View of the Port with the Capitol.”

In 1639, the Spanish King Philip IV commissioned Lorrain to create seven works, which are now in the Prado Museum. Among them are two landscapes with hermits.

Among other customers, it is necessary to mention Pope Urban VIII, who bought 4 works, Cardinal Bentivoglio, Prince Colonna.

Lorrain’s last work, “Landscape with Oskanius Shooting a Deer,” was completed in the year of the artist’s death, and is considered a true masterpiece.

Lorrain was not married, but had a daughter, Agnes, born in 1653. To her he bequeathed all his property, including a harpsichord, a press for printing engravings and a catalog of his paintings “Liber veritatis”.

Claude Lorrain died in 1682 in Rome.