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Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman
8/24/2006 Drawings from the British Museum Legion of Honor, San Francisco
14 October 2006–14 January 2007
San Francisco, 24 August 2006—The great French 17th-century landscape artist Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682) is showcased in this stunning exhibition that presents 90 of his splendid drawings and etchings from the British Museum’s incomparable collection of works by Claude. These signal graphic works are joined by 12 superbly wrought paintings drawn from international collections, including the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., Musée de Genoble, France, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Galleria Doria-Pamphilil, Rome, National Gallery, London, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition incorporates works by Claude from all stages of his career and traces his direct response to the topography and atmospheric effects characteristic of the Roman countryside.
Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman is the first exhibition in the United States to focus specifically on Claude’s drawings and his working methods. His work is placed within the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of 17th-century Rome, his adopted home. This is the first exhibition to deal exclusively with Claude’s oeuvre since the 1982 show organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Louvre, Paris, on the tercentenary of the artist’s death. After its showing in San Francisco, the exhibition will be on view at the only other venue, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, from 4 February through
29 April 2007.
The exquisite drawings and etchings included in the exhibition represent the artist’s complete life work, and they range from his earliest known sketches to his final compositions and the famous Liber drawings. These graphic works enhance the understanding of the importance of the process of direct observation and notation of the natural world in drawings to the evolution of Claude’s art. Importantly, the selection explores of Claude’s artistic process, from first sketches to completed paintings as well as beautiful drawings created as independent works of art in their own right. Says Dr. Lynn Orr, Head of European Art, Fine Arts Museums, “Collectively the graphic works and paintings reveal the full power and beauty of Claude Lorrain’s art and explain his enduring fame as one of the creators of the European landscape tradition.”
Claude spent his working career in Rome, the 17th-century convergence point of Europe’s most inventive artists. There, he was part of a revolutionary reappraisal of the artistic relationship between nature and artifice. Together with Annibale Carraci, Domenichino, and Poussin, Claude established a new landscape format—the classical landscape—a paradigm that remained until the ascendancy of the Impressionists in the 19th-century. Claude sought classical calm, order, and harmony in his paintings; however, the basis for this new response to nature and natural phenomena came through the direct and prolonged observation of the landscape itself. Claude’s contemporaries record his novel activity of actually sketching our-of-doors directly in front of his landscape subject. His drawings reveal this intimate relationship and illustrate the foundation of baroque illusionism.
Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum is divided into five thematic sections. The first one, an introductory section, presents examples of Claude’s four main drawing types: sketches from nature, compositional drawings, pictorial compositions, and drawings for the Liber Veritatis, which Claude produced as a record of his paintings. The second section displays many of Claude’s nature drawings, which were often made en plein air. These works range from detailed studies, with minutely articulated details, to the other aspects of his nature drawings, such as the rapid ink and wash creations. These evoke the effects of shade and shadow rather than aiming to identify a specific location. The subject of the third section of the exhibition is Claude’s embrace of the modern world while evoking the Arcadian past. On view are many idyllic and pastoral scenes with ancient Roman ruins within the landscape, a poetic subject that Claude frequently explored, combining a backdrop of naturalism with ancient figures and buildings and delicate atmospheric effects to create a poignant classical spirit. The preparatory studies on view in the fourth section of the exhibition reveal Claude’s artistic process as a maker of pictures. Equally important, they demonstrate that his fully realized composition drawings display a pictorial and conceptual beauty as powerful as both his nature studies and his finished paintings. In these drawings, Claude explores formal elements such as setting, lighting, and narrative, often from his initial conception to the finished painting, to the final drawing that records that painting in his Liber Veritatis. The last section of the exhibition showcases Claude’s later works, including his final etching, The Goatherd. Many of the works in this section display an increasingly idealized treatment of the landscape and reflect the strong influence on the artist of classical literary works such as The Aeneid. Claude Lorrain is universally recognized for his unique contributions to the landscape genre that had emerged only in the early 17thcentury. His particular blending of natural observation, evocative atmosphere, and classical construction combined to raise landscape painting from its status as simply a backdrop for human activity to a noble subject in its own right.
Organization and Credit
Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum was organized by The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with the British Museum. The presentation in San Francisco is generously supported by the San Francisco Auxiliary of the Fine Arts Museums.
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue written by Richard Rand, the Sterling and Francine Clark institute, and published by Sterling and Francine Clark Institute. Available in the Museum Stores.
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