Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain invented the way Europe looked at landscape for two centuries and did it by putting the sun in the middle of the picture. He was born Claude Gellee in the duchy of Lorraine, orphaned young, and reached Rome as a teenager, where he worked as a pastry cook and then as a studio assistant to Agostino Tassi, the quadratura painter. He spent almost his whole career in Rome. What he made were harbour scenes and pastoral landscapes with small figures from myth or scripture, bathed in a light that comes from low in the frame - dawn or evening - and dissolves the distance; the subject is nominally Aeneas or Hagar and actually the air. He drew constantly in the Campagna and composed in the studio from those studies rather than from the motif. Because his work was widely forged he kept the Liber Veritatis, a book of drawn records of every finished picture with the buyer noted, which survives and is a nearly complete catalogue - an unusual piece of self-defence for the period. English collectors bought him heavily in the eighteenth century, Turner asked to be hung beside him and was, and the landscape gardening of Stourhead and Stowe is composed from his pictures. The Liber Veritatis passed to the Duke of Devonshire and is now in the British Museum, with about two hundred drawings. Turner left two paintings to the National Gallery on condition they hang permanently between two Claudes, which they do. His etchings are few but were studied closely by Constable and by generations of English watercolour painters. Hazlitt and Ruskin both wrote at length about him, Ruskin with reservations about the truth of the foliage. He never married, was said to be barely literate, and died wealthy in Rome at eighty-two.

• Lived: 1600 CE – 1682 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: artist