Getty Displays Two Lorrain Works
Metropolitan Museum of Art Loans Baroque Painting to California
Two works by French Baroque landscape painter Claude Lorrain are on special view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California.
Two masterpieces by French Baroque painter and draftsman Claude Lorrain (ca. 1604/5-1682), Coast View with the Abduction of Europa (ca. 1645) and The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet (ca. 1643), are on view alongside each other at Los Angeles, California's J. Paul Getty Museum until May 11, 2008. The latter work is on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Claude Lorrain
Of humble peasant origins, Claude Gellée was later called Claude Lorrain after the French duchy or province that was his birthplace. The academically untalented Lorrain journeyed to Italy around 1617, where he studied the landscape painting of Northern European and Roman artists. He then briefly apprenticed in Naples (1619-1621) and Rome (1625). Lorrain subsequently traveled throughout Italy, France and Germany before permanently settling in the Eternal City in 1627 and attracting the patronage of Pope Urban VIII (r. 1623-1644).
By 1633, Claude Lorrain excelled in the representation of light, established his signature style, joined Rome's Accademia di San Luca and elevated the genre of landscape painting to a highly respectable art form. The luminosity of his compositions was achieved through the application of thin and semi-transparent layers of oil paint to his canvases. Unfortunately, his paintings were frequently forged during his lifetime. As a result, the artist made drawings of them, noted their purchasers' names and catalogued the sheets in six volumes he called the Liber veritatis (Book of Truth).
Coast View with the Abduction of Europa
Lorrain painted Coast View with the Abduction of Europa in 1645. The mythological tale of the god Jupiter, in the guise of a white bull whisking Europa, princess of Tyre, away to Crete while astride his massive back, is depicted against the scene of a fortified harbor. Four attendants bestow wreaths and flowers upon the departing beast and maiden. The artist accurately portrayed architectural elements from the port city in the painting's misty background, including a familiar square tower, stone bridge with two round turrets and watch tower with its partially crenellated top and rusticated base.
Conveniently located near Claude Lorrain's work is The Abduction of Europa (1632) by Dutch Baroque master Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), a somewhat visually darker interpretation of the same theme.
The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet
Painted in 1643, The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet was inspired by Book V (604-695) of the Aeneid by classical Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.). After the fall of Troy, the city's women sought to end their years of wandering by setting their ships aflame. Lorrain's seascape sensitively captures the atmospheric effects of Jupiter's approaching storm whose rain extinguished the fires aboard all but four of the intricately detailed vessels. The painter's Liber veritatis notes that the work was commissioned by the prominent prelate Girolamo Farnese upon his return to Rome. The composition is perhaps an allusion to the itinerant papal nuncio's preaching against the Calvinist "heresy" in the Swiss Confederation's remote Alpine regions.
Sources:
- Rand, Richard. Claude Lorrain: The Painter as Draftsman (exh. cat.). Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2007.
- Russell, H. Diane. Claude Lorrain 1600-1682 (exh. cat.). Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982.
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