CLAUDE OF LORRAINE, or CLAUDE GELÉE (1600-1682), the celebrated landscape-painter, was born of very poor parents at the village of Chamagne in Lorraine. When it was discovered that he made no progress at school, he was apprenticed, it is commonly said, to a pastry-cook, but this is extremely dubious. At the age of twelve, being left an orphan, he went to live at Freiburg with an elder brother, Jean Gelée, a wood-carver of moderate merit, and under him he designed arabesques and foliage. He afterwards rambled to Rome to seek a livelihood ; but. from his clownishness and ignorance of the language, he failed to obtain permanent employment. He next went to Naples, to study landscape painting under Godfrey Waals, a painter of much repute. With him he remained two years ; then he returned to Rome, and was domesticated until April 1625 with another landscape-painter, Augustin Tassi, who hired him to grind his colours and to do all the household drudgery. His master, hoping to make Claude serviceable in some of his greatest works, advanced him in the rules of perspective and the elements of design. Under his tuition the mind of Claude began to expand, and he devoted him-self to artistic study with great eagerness. He exerted his utmost industry to explore the true principles of painting by an incessant examination of nature ; and for this purpose he made his studies in the open fields, where he very frequently remained from sunrise till sunset, watching the effect of the shifting light upon the landscape. He generally sketched whatever he thought beautiful or striking, marking every tinge of light with a similar colour ; from these sketches he perfected his landscapes. Leaving Tassi, he made a tour in Italy, France, and a part of Germany, including his native Lorraine, suffering numerous misadventures by the way. Karl Dervent, painter to the duke of Lorraine, kept him as assistant for a year ; and he painted at Nancy the architectural subjects on the ceiling of the Carmelite church. He did not, however, relish this employment, and in 1627 returned to Rome. Here, painting two landscapes for Cardinal Bentivoglio, he earned the protection of Pope Urban VIII. and rapidly rose into celebrity.

Claude was not only acquainted with the facts, but also with the laws, of nature ; and Sandrart relates that he used to explain, as they walked together through the fields, the causes of the different appearances of the same landscape at different hours of the day, from the reflections or refrac-tions of light, or from the morning and evening dews or vapours, with all the precision of a natural philosopher. He elaborated his pictures with great care ; and if any performance fell short of his ideal, he altered, erased, and repainted it several times over.





His skies are aerial and full of lustre, and every object harmoniously illumined. His distances and colouring are delicate, and his tints have a sweetness and variety till then unexampled. He frequently gave an uncommmon tender-ness to his finished trees by glazing. His figures, however, are very indifferent; but he was so conscious of his deficiency in this respect, that he usually engaged other artists to paint them for him, among whom were Curtois and Filippo Lauri. Indeed, he was wont to say that he sold his landscapes and gave away his figures. In order to avoid a repetition of the same subject, and also to detect the very numerous spurious copies of his works, he made tinted outline drawings (in six paper books prepared for this purpose) of all those pictures which were transmitted to different countries; and on the back of each drawing he wrote the name of the purchaser. These books he named Libri di Verità. This valuable work has been engraved and published, and has always been highly esteemed by students of the art of landscape. Claude died at Rome at the age of eighty-two, on the 21st of November 1682, leaving his wealth, which was considerable, between his only surviving relatives, a nephew and niece. Many choice specimens of his genius may be seen in the Natioual Gallery, and in the Louvre ; the landscapes in the Altieri and Colonna Palaces in Bome are also of especial celebrity. He himself regarded a landscape which he painted in the Villa Madama, being a cento of various views with great abundance and variety of leafage, and a composition of Esther and Ahasuerus, as his finest works ; the former he refused to sell, although Clement IX. offered to cover its surface with gold pieces. He etched a series of twenty-eight landscapes, fine impressions of which are greatly prized. Full of amenity, and deeply sensitive to the graces of nature, Claude has long been deemed the prince of landscape painters, and indeed he must always be accounted a prime leader in that form of art, and in his day a great enlarger and refiner of its province. Within the last century, however, he has been vastly exceeded—in grasp, power, knowledge, subtlety, variety, and general mastery of all kinds—by many painters, one in one quality and another in another; in proof we need only name Turner, whose range, in com-parison with Claude's, was as that of a continent to a canton, or a mountain to a hillock.

Claude was a man of amiable and simple character, very kind to his pupils, a patient and unwearied worker; in his own sphere of study, his mind was stored (as we have seen) with observation and knowledge, but he continued an unlettered man till his death. (w. M. R.)