Claudio de Lorena Biography

Claudio de Lorena

(Claude Gelleé or Claude Lorrain; Chamagne, near Mirecourt, 1600-Rome, 1682).French painter.The third of the children of a very humble family, he was orphaned very young and lived in Freiburg with the eldest of his brothers, who was a wood engraver.Around 1613 he went to Rome, where he was raised and later a student of the painter Agostino Tassi.From 1620 he made some trips and stayed in Naples, Nancy and Venice for a while, but in 1626 he returned to Rome, where he remained until his death.

Around 1630 he met Nicolas Poussin, with whom he would join a great friendship.By that time he had already achieved notable fame as a landscape painter, and by 1638 he received numerous commissions from ecclesiastical personalities and the Roman aristocracy.Even the King of Spain, Felipe IV, commissioned him eight landscapes and seascapes, of which five are preserved in the Prado Museum.

Villa in the Roman countryside (1647), by Claudio de Lorena

In his painting, in addition to the teachings of his teacher Tassi, influences from Flemish and Dutch painters are appreciated.Claudio de Lorena, who along with Nicolas Poussin occupies a prominent place in seventeenth-century French painting, created a type of landscape in which he captured the variety and beauty of nature with great poetic sense.The subtlety with which he expressed the atmospheric phenomena and the lights of the Roman countryside in his paintings would not be equaled until the arrival of Impressionism.

Such natural beauty is often the setting in which a mythological or historical scene unfolds, the representation of which however occupies only a small part of the surface of the canvas.Thus, in a painting like Cleopatra's Landing at Tarsus , which presents the first meeting between Mark Antony and Queen Cleopatra, the protagonists are barely distinguished; and the same happens, to a greater or lesser extent, with all the human figures of his most characteristic canvases

Among his works, distributed throughout the world, are The Penitent Magdalene, Embarque en Ostia de saint Paula Romana, The return of the flock and Moses saved from the waters, in the Prado; Peasant festival and View of the Vaccino field, in Rome; Seaport at sunset and Cleopatra's landing in Tarsus, at the Louvre; Aeneas hunting the deer, in Brussels; Embarkation of Saint Ursula and Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, at the National Gallery in London; Acis and Galatea, in Dresden; Jacob and Laban's daughters, in the Hermitage.