Claude Lorrain Art

Claude Lorrain, born Claude Gellée, was a French painter, draughtsman and engraver of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in Italy and is admired for his achievements in landscape painting. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns that entered into these quiet scenes. Landscape as a subject was distinctly nontraditional and secular during this time of religious and mythical iconography, and Gellée was certainly breaking with tradition. John Constable described the artist as the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw and declared that in Claude’s landscape, “all is lovely, all amiable, all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart." He passed away on November 23, 1682.