Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 21

Claude Lorraine (French: 1600-1682).

Claude Gellée was the son of humble parents, and to the end he was an unlettered man. He was born in the village of Champagne, in the Vosges, Duchy of Lorraine, and thence acquired the name of Le Lorrain. Lineal descendants of Claude's brother still live in the village, and the house in which he was born is now preserved as a museum of relics of the painter. He was brought up, it is said, as a pastry-cook, but he entered the household of Agostino Tassi, a Perugian landscape painter, at Rome, in the capacity of general factotum, cooking his master's meals and grinding his colours. From him Claude received his first instruction in art. Subsequently he travelled to the Tyrol and to Venice – the influence of which place may be seen in the "gentle ripples of waveless seas" in his Seaports. After working for some time at Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, he returned in October 1627 to Rome, and there settled down for the remainder of his life. The house which he inhabited may still be seen at the angle of the streets Sistina and Gregoriana. Of his life at Rome many interesting particulars are given by his friend Sandrart, a German painter, who was for some years his companion. "In order," says Sandrart, "that he might be able to study closely the innermost secrets of nature, he used to linger in the open air from before daybreak even to nightfall, so that he might learn to depict with a scrupulous adherence to nature's model the changing phases of dawn, the rising and setting sun, as well as the hours of twilight… In this most difficult and toilsome mode of study he spent many years; making excursions into the country every day, and returning even after a long journey without finding it irksome. Sometimes I have chanced to meet him amongst the steepest cliffs at Tivoli, handling the brush before those well-known waterfalls, and painting the actual scene, not by the aid of imagination or invention, but according to the very objects which nature placed before him."39 (One of these sketches is now in the British Museum.) On one expedition to Tivoli, Claude was accompanied, we know, by Poussin, but for the most part he lived a secluded life; "he did not," says Sandrart, "in everyday life much affect the civilities of polite society." Such seclusion must partly have been necessary to enable Claude to cope with the commissions that crowded in upon him. For the Pope Urban VIII. he painted the four pictures now in the Louvre, and the three succeeding popes were all among his patrons. So was Cardinal Mazarin and the Duke of Bouillon, the Papal Commander-in-Chief, for whom amongst other pictures he painted two (12 and 14) in this Gallery. England was a great buyer of his works: nineteen were ordered from here in 1644 alone; and commissions came also from Denmark and the Low Countries. One sees the pressure of a busy man in the number of "stock" subjects which he repeated. He suffered much too from forgers, and it was partly to check the sale of fictitious Claudes that he prepared his "Liber Veritatis" – a collection of drawings of all his pictures, now in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. Two hundred and seventy more of his drawings may be seen in the British Museum. For his figures, however, he was glad of outside help, and many painters put these in for him. The soft, pensive, and almost feminine charm which characterises his landscapes well agree with what we know of his life. He was passionately fond of music. To a little girl, "living with me and brought up in my house in charity," he bequeathed much of his treasures. He had received also a poor, lame lad into his house, whom he instructed in painting and music, and who rewarded him by demanding arrears of salary for "assistance." Towards his poor relations he was uniformly generous, and when Sandrart left him it was a nephew from the Vosges whom he called to keep house for him.

With regard to the characteristics of Claude's art, his general position in the history of landscape painting has been defined in the chapter on the French School, and some further points of detail are noticed under his several works. Here, however, it may be convenient to give Ruskin's summary of the matter. (1) Claude had a fine feeling for beauty of form, and is seldom ungraceful in his foliage. His tenderness of conception is especially shown in delicate aerial effects, such as no one had ever rendered before, and in some respects, no one has ever done in oil-colour since. But their character appears to rise rather from a delicacy of bodily constitution in Claude than from any mental sensibility; such as they are, they give a kind of feminine charm to his work, which partly accounts for its wide influence. To whatever their character may be traced, it renders him incapable of enjoying or painting anything energetic or terrible. Thus a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of Claude is beyond praise in all qualities of air. But he was incapable of rendering great effects of space and infinity. (2) As with his skies, so too with his seas. They are the finest pieces of water painting in ancient art. But they are selections of the particular moment when the sea is most insipid and characterless. (3) He had sincerity of purpose; but in common with the other landscape painters of his day, neither earnestness, humility, nor love, such as would ever cause him to forget himself. Hence there is in his work no simple or honest record of any single truth, and his pictures, when examined with reference to essential truth, are one mass of error from beginning to end. So far as he felt the truth, he tried to be true; but he never felt it enough to sacrifice supposed propriety, or habitual method, to it. Very few of his sketches and none of his pictures show evidence of interest in other natural phenomena than the quiet afternoon sunshine which would fall methodically into a composition.40 One would suppose he had never seen scarlet in a morning cloud, nor a storm burst on the Apennines. (4) He shows a peculiar incapacity of understanding the main point of a matter, and of men of name is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of expression. (5) Yet in spite of all his deficiencies Claude effected a revolution in art. This revolution consisted in setting the sun in heaven. We will give him the credit of this with no drawbacks.41 Till Claude's time no one had seriously thought of painting the sun but conventionally; that is so say, as a red or yellow star (often), with a face in it, under which type it was constantly represented in illumination; else it was kept out of the picture, or introduced in fragmentary distances, breaking through clouds with almost definite rays. Claude first set it in the pictorial heaven (collected from Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3, 5, 14, sec. iii. ch. i. § 9, ch. iii. §§ 13-15, 17; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. §§ 22, 27, and Appendix i.; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. v. §§ 10, 11). This summary should show that it is a mistake to represent Ruskin as blind to the merits of Claude. He has done full justice to Claude's amenity and pensive grace; to the beauty of his skies and the skill and charm of his aerial effects. At the time when Ruskin began to write Modern Painters, Claude was still accounted the prince of all landscape painters. The estimate of Claude against which Ruskin protested may be found in Goethe. "Claude Lorraine," he said, "knew the real world thoroughly, even to its smallest detail, and he made use of it to express the world contained in his own beautiful soul. He stands to nature in a double relation, – he is both her slave and her master: her slave, by the material means which he is obliged to employ to make himself understood; her master, because he subordinates these material means to a well reasoned inspiration, to which he makes them serve as instruments." And elsewhere, Goethe expresses his admiration for the depth and grasp of Claude's powers. Ruskin, in vindicating the greater sweep and depth of Turner's genius, fastened with all the emphasis of an advocate upon the weak points in Claude's artistic and intellectual armoury. By so doing he cleared the ground for a truer appreciation of Claude. As a corrective or supplement to Ruskin's adverse criticisms, the reader may be referred to Constable's enthusiastic appreciations. "I do not wonder," wrote Constable to his wife, "at you being jealous of Claude. If anything could come between our love, it is him… The Claudes, the Claudes are all, all, I can think of here" (Leslie's Life of Constable, 1845, p. 121). Constable was writing from Sir George Beaumont's house, where several of the Claudes, now in the National Gallery, were then hanging. Constable, however, was alive to some of Claude's defects. "Claude's exhilaration and light," he wrote to Leslie, "departed from him when he was between fifty and sixty, and he then became a professor of the 'higher walks of art,' and fell in a great degree into the manner of the painters around him; so difficult is it to be natural, so easy to be superior in our own opinion. When we have the pleasure of being together at the National Gallery I think I shall not find it difficult to illustrate these remarks, as Carr has sent a large picture of the latter description" (ibid., p. 221). The picture in question is No. 6, painted in 1658.

For the story of Cephalus, who is here receiving from Procris the presents of Diana, the hound Lelaps, and the fatal dart with which she was killed, see under 698. As for the landscape, Mr. Ruskin cites this picture as an instance of the "childishness and incompetence" of Claude's foregrounds.

"I will not," he writes, "say anything of the agreeable composition of the three banks, rising one behind another from the water, except only that it amounts to a demonstration that all three were painted in the artist's study, without any reference to nature whatever. In fact, there is quite enough intrinsic evidence in each of them to prove this, seeing that what appears to be meant for vegetation upon them amounts to nothing more than a green stain on their surfaces, the more evidently false because the leaves of the trees twenty yards farther off are all perfectly visible and distinct; and that the sharp lines with which each cuts against that beyond it are not only such as crumbling earth could never show or assume, but are maintained through their whole progress ungraduated, unchanging, and unaffected by any of the circumstances of varying shade to which every one of nature's lines is inevitably subjected. In fact the whole arrangement is the impotent struggle of a tyro to express by successive edges that approach of earth which he finds himself incapable of expressing by the drawing of the surface. Claude wished to make you understand that the edge of his pond came nearer and nearer; he had probably often tried to do this with an unbroken bank, or a bank only varied by the delicate and harmonious anatomy of nature: and he had found that owing to his total ignorance of the laws of perspective such efforts on his part invariably ended in his reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and making it look perpendicular. Much comfort and solace of mind in such unpleasant circumstances may be derived from instantly dividing the obnoxious bank into a number of successive promontories, and developing their edges with completeness and intensity" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. iv. §§ 17, 18).