Attributed to Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain, A Wooded River Landscape with Shepherds and their Flock

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

74.2 × 98.8 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-149634

This serene and atmospheric landscape is a prime example of the tradition for so-called ‘Arcadian’ landscapes that developed in Italy during the 17th century. Among the genre’s most celebrated exponents was the French-born Claude Gellée, called Lorrain, whose time living and working in Italy is well-documented. Like the vast majority of Claude’s oeuvre, this canvas would have been painted in Rome. His first trip to the city may have taken place as early as 1617 when, at the age of 12 or 13, his first biographer, Joachim von Sandrart, records him as working as a pastry cook. After an itinerant period during which he worked under Goffredo Wals in Naples and Claude Deruet in his native Lorraine, he returned once more to Rome and it was there that he was to remain, except for short trips elsewhere in Italy, for the rest of his long and highly productive life. Stylistically, this work can be compared to his Landscape with Shepherds and Shepherdesses dancing, dated 1634, which together with this painting once formed part of the Agar/Westminster collections. That our painting is broadly contemporaneous with that work is further indicated by its omission from the Liber Veritatis – the record Claude kept of his paintings after 1635, by which time he had been a productive artist for more than ten years.