Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain (c. 1600–1682) was born Claude Gellée in the village of Chamagne in the Duchy of Lorraine, and did almost all his painting in Italy. He worked for the landscapist Goffredo Wals in Naples and then for Agostino Tassi in Rome, spent a short time with Claude Deruet back in Lorraine, and by the late 1620s had settled in Rome near the Spanish Steps, where he lived for the rest of his life. By the end of the 1630s he was the leading landscape painter in Italy, with commissions from Philip IV of Spain and four pictures for Pope Urban VIII. Small figures from the Bible or classical myth lifted his landscapes into the more prestigious category of history painting, and he brought the sun and streaming sunlight into pictures where they had rarely appeared before. From about 1636 he recorded his finished paintings in drawings gathered in the Liber Veritatis. After his death English collectors took to him, and Britain still holds a high proportion of his work. Three works here: Landscape with Aeneas at Delos, Landscape with Cephalus and Procris Reunited by Diana, and The Port of Ostia with the embarkation of Saint Paula.