His Early Life

Claude le Lorrain, also known as Claude Gellee (1600-1682) or Claude, was born in a village in the Vosges region of northeastern France. Though the year of his birth is often recorded as 1600, the year 1604/5 is also generally accepted. He was a French artist best known for landscape painting. His art form sought to present nature in a way and form more beautiful and glamorous than nature itself. Claude was born in a poor family and he was one of his parents’ five sons. He received little schooling in his childhood and he may have lived with his older brother who was a printmaker in Freiburg. Historians suspect that his parents died when he was 12 years old. Within a few years after the death of his parents, he travelled south to Rome. His first appearance in Rome was as a pastry cook.

His Art Education

In Rome, Claude was trained as an artist by Agostino Tassi, a landscape artist and leading Italian painter of illusionistic architectural frescoes. He also spent two years in Naples with Goffredo Wals, who was also one of the pupils of Tassi. Experts say that Tassi gave Claude a lasting interest in perspective and in landscape painting. In 1625, Claude left Tassi and went to Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, where he worked for a year as an assistant to Claude Deruet on some frescoes in the Carmelite church. About 2 years later, Claude returned to Rome and settled down there permanently. Claude never married, but he had a daughter named Agnese and she lived with him.

Low Profile Personality

Claude is said to have been disciplined, quiet, and good-hearted and he hardly took part in public life and chose to live a solitary life except essentially for his work. In his early period, he mixed with other artists, especially those who were of northern European origin like himself. He was close to the famed painter Nicholas Possin, another French master of landscape painting. However, there was least artistic contact between them. Although his formal education was limited and he wrote French and Italian haltingly, Claude was not an ignorant person. He had adequate knowledge of the Bible and had a special feeling for the country. Claude led a bourgeois style of life. He pursued a successful career and amassed a comfortable level of fortune.

His Well-known Works of Art

Experts feel that Claude did not take up landscape painting until after 1627 and his first dated work is ‘Landscape With Cattle and Peasants‘. He made this painting in 1629. Claude rose to fame in the early 1630s. According to a famous biographer Baldinucci, Claude achieved this because of his skill in representing those conditions of nature that produce views of the sun, particularly on seawater and over rivers at dawn and evening. He became one of the leading landscape painters in Italy by about 1637 with commissions from Pope Urban VIII, several cardinals and Philip IV of Spain.

‘The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet’

Claude’s famous painting ‘The Trojan Wome Setting Fire to Their Fleet’ illustrates a narrative from Virgil and was painted for his patron Girolamo Farnese, who had returned to his native Rome after five years as papal nuncio in the Swiss cantons fighting the spread of Calvinism. In the painting, there is a depiction of the women of Troy, who had wandered for seven years and then set their ships aflame in the hope of settling in Sicily. While some billows from the two vessels i the centre, torchbearers approach the ship anchored at the water’s edge.

His Remarkable work ‘Liber Veritatis’ or ‘Books of Truth’

Claude was following a record-keeping device in the form of a finished ink drawing of each painting, usually with the country to which it was sent and the name of the purchaser on the reverse. He called the volume the ‘Liber Veritatis’ or ‘Book of Truth’ and its contents are of inestimable value for the study of his career. In this book, Claude documented sales and patrons so as to safeguard against the forgery of the nearly 200 etchings of his paintings.

Claude emerged as an independent artist in the late 1620s. His earliest dated canvas is a pastoral subject painted in 1629. ‘The Storm’ is among his first prints. He is His best-known paintings include ‘Ulysses Returns Chryself to Her Father’, ‘Pastoral Landscape with a Mill’, (1634), ‘The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Feet’, ‘Coast View with Perseus and the Origin of Coral’, ‘View of La Crescenza’, ‘Queen Esther Approaching the Palace of Ahasuerus‘,