The catalogue — paintings in chronological order, then drawings and etchings — each work with a commentary.
224 works by the painter and workshop · 92 copies and works after · 36,476 words of commentary · Part 5 of 9 · 1660–1677
Mercury piping to Argus (a ducal French collection): the rescue's method — the messenger-god lulls the warder with music before the sword; the deadliest lullaby in Ovid staged as a herding idyll: two figures, cattle, evening — and the entire plot in a flute. With its Juno companion, the œuvre's most complete two-act myth.
The Adoration of the Golden Calf (Manchester Art Gallery): the idol-dance in its 1660s statement — Karlsruhe's subject a decade on, the ring cooler, the valley wider; Manchester's Claude gave the industrial North its ideal landscape, and its warning about shining things.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q106407638
The Hermitage's Times of Day — the famous Petersburg quartet: Morning (Jacob with the daughters of Laban at the well), Noon (the Rest on the Flight into Egypt), Evening (Tobias and the angel with the fish), Night (Jacob wrestling the angel) — four canvases painted across the 1660s, gathered by the eighteenth-century market and hung in Russia as a single cycle of the day. Wikidata records the ensemble under this entry; the individual canvases receive their own entries in this catalogue, and this one tells the story of the whole — which is, in large part, the story of how Europe came to understand what Claude's art had been about all along.
Whether or not Claude conceived any two of the four as pendants (the scholarship is cautious: the dates spread over a decade, and the Liber records separate commissions), the assembled cycle possesses a coherence that has persuaded every audience since: each canvas keys a biblical journey to an hour — covenant courtship to morning, the commanded rest to noon, the guided road home to evening, and the wrestling by the ford of Jabbok to night — so that the day's round becomes a life's: setting out, pausing, returning, contending. The hours are painted with the meteorological exactness this catalogue has tracked everywhere (dawn's wet silver at the well; noon's shade-and-blaze; evening's long gold on Tobias's road; and in Night — the rarest Claude of all, his one true nocturne-struggle — moonlit dark holding a fight that lasts till dawn). Hung together, the four teach the œuvre's secret openly: the hour is the subject; the stories are the hour's inhabitants.
Assembled under Catherine the Great and her successors and hung as a suite, the cycle became one of the Hermitage's canonical rooms and Russian culture's principal Claude: generations of Petersburg painters, poets and schoolchildren took the day's four stations from these walls; the ensemble is cited through Russian aesthetics and literature (the 'Claude light' of Russian elegy descends from it), and Soviet and post-Soviet museology has kept the quartet's hang — a piece of eighteenth-century curatorship preserved alive, like the National Gallery's Turner wall, as an artwork of arrangement in its own right. In the Claude literature the set holds a special brief: it is the great demonstration that his pictures system-build — that canvases painted years apart, for different patrons, lock into cycles because the œuvre itself was always one continuous meditation on the day.
Sequence. See them in order, morning to night, and watch one grammar conjugate: the same tonal staircase climbed at four angles of sun; the same fords and wells and roads serving four covenants; the same small humanity — courting, resting, walking, wrestling — carried through the light's whole revolution. Then note the cycle's shape: it ends not in sleep but in struggle — Jacob at Peniel, holding on till daybreak for the blessing — and take the arrangement's accidental profundity as this catalogue takes the œuvre entire: the day Claude painted for sixty years closes, in Petersburg, with night contested and dawn implied; the light, as always in him, is coming back.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q21716886 Wikipedia (es)
Oil on canvas, 116 by 159.6 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg — known in Russia for two centuries simply as 'Noon': one of the four great Claudes that the Hermitage hung as the Times of Day. Under the full height of midday, the Holy Family rests by a stream in deep tree-shade; an angel serves them; a ford glitters beyond; cattle drowse; and the light — vertical, white-gold, shadowless in the open and absolute in the shade — performs the rarest hour in Claude's repertoire. Painted in 1661, it is the finest of his few noons and the centre of one of collecting history's most poetic ensembles.
Claude's art lives at the day's slanted ends — dawn and dusk make tonal staircases; noon flattens them — and his rare high-sun pictures are technical tours de force precisely because the system must survive without its favourite geometry. 'Noon' solves the hour with shade: the composition polarises into brilliant openness and profound tree-dark, recession is carried by the density of light rather than its angle, and the resting subject — sacred travellers halted while the sun stands still — matches the meteorology perfectly: this is the hour when journeys pause, and the Flight's one commanded rest finds its natural clock. The angelic service in the shadow (bread offered, the ass unloaded) gives the pause its liturgy; the ford beyond waits for the cooler hours. Among all the Flight pictures this catalogue has walked, the Hermitage canvas is the meridian — the subject's forty-year road crossing its highest sun.
The ensemble is the entry's second subject: the Hermitage's four — 'Morning' (Jacob at the well), this 'Noon', 'Evening' (Tobias), 'Night' (Jacob wrestling the angel) — were painted as independent works across the 1660s, assembled by later owners into a day-cycle, and hung together in Petersburg, where Russian culture received them as a single poem: the day's four hours, each carrying a biblical journey, morning-covenant to midnight-struggle. (This catalogue meets the set's other members among the entries that follow; the group entry Q106407638 tells the ensemble's story whole.) The assembly may outrun Claude's intention — but not his logic: no painter's œuvre invites the arrangement more, since the hour was always his true subject, and the Hermitage's hang merely made the œuvre's secret architecture visible on one wall.
The shade's interior — enter it as the family does, and note how much picture happens below the light: the angel's service, the unloaded baggage, the stream's dark glitter — Claude's only fully-inhabited shadow; the open ground's noon blaze, value-flattened with complete meteorological honesty; the cattle's drowse (time told by animals, the pastoral's clock); and the hour's meaning, which the Russian title caught better than any iconographer: Noon — rest at the light's summit, the day and the journey and the œuvre itself pausing together, the one Claude in which nothing is arriving or departing and the sun, for once, stands still. The Liber anchors the 1661 date; condition is good, the crucial shade-passages unsunk.
Landscape with Tobias and the Angel — 'Evening' (Hermitage): the third of the Petersburg Times of Day: Tobias, fish in hand, walks home beside Raphael in the long last gold — the guided road at the guided hour. Painted 1663; the cycle's homecoming panel, and the Hermitage's gentlest Claude: the day ending as providence prefers, on the road, accompanied, almost there. (The set's story is told under the Times of Day entry.)
Pastoral landscape with the Flight into Egypt (Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid): the family small on the road in wide 1660s evening — Madrid's other Claude, across the paseo from the Prado's Retiro giants: the city can compare the Spanish crown's grand Claude with the private collector's intimate one.
Landscape with Mercury and Battus (Chatsworth House): the herdsman bribed to silence and tested — Battus turned to touchstone for betraying the god's stolen cattle; herding myth's parable of witness, at Chatsworth among the Devonshire collection that also guarded the Liber Veritatis for two centuries: the house held Claude's truth-book and his lie-fable together.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q30610514
Oil on canvas, 174 by 220 cm — one of the vast late canvases, painted 1662–63 for Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, the great patron of Claude's final decades, and long afterwards a famous ornament of the Miles collection at Leigh Court near Bristol. Psyche's father, alarmed by his daughter's fatal beauty (no suitor dares her), sacrifices at Apollo's temple to learn her destiny; the oracle's terrible answer — expose her on a mountain to a monstrous bridegroom — waits in the smoke. Claude builds the scene as sacred landscape at full ceremony: the temple's columned mass among great trees, the procession and altar, and beyond them a river valley of enormous, ominous serenity.
The picture opens the œuvre's last great chapter: Claude's Psyche series for Colonna, which would culminate a year later in the Enchanted Castle. Apuleius's tale — beauty exiled, loved unseen, tested, lost, restored — gave the old painter his final subject-world, and the choice reads as summary: Psyche's story is the embarkation theme turned inward, a soul's departure and arrival, and Claude painted its stations (the sacrifice, the exposure, the palace solitude, the rescue from the river — this catalogue meets them all) with the late manner's cooled light and lengthened figures. This first canvas sets the cycle's tone of foreboding ceremony: nothing violent occurs — a father prays, smoke rises — but the valley's stillness has the quality Claude reserved for fate, and the temple's grandeur stands at the exact angle of institutions consulted too late.
The picture's English chapter matters to taste-history: at Leigh Court it hung among the West Country's famous collections, seen by the young Turner circle and cited in the period's connoisseurship (the Leigh Court Claudes were among the pictures that fed Bristol-school landscape and the touring-critic literature); its sale and subsequent travels scattered that context, but the canvas keeps its standing in the scholarship as the Psyche cycle's opening monument and one of the largest, gravest statements of the late sacred-ceremonial mode.
The altar's smoke — the picture's hinge, prayer becoming oracle, painted as one grey ascent against the valley's gold; the temple's columns among the tree-trunks (architecture and forest as one order, the late Claude's deepest visual idea); the procession's small solemnity, figures elongated in the 1660s manner; and the distance — river, bridge, hills — laid in the cooled palette that makes late Claude feel like evening even at midday: the cycle's whole future is in that tonality, and the viewer who goes next to the Enchanted Castle will find the same light waiting, one station further into the myth, with the ceremony over and the girl alone.
The Colonna provenance deserves its sentence: Lorenzo Onofrio's commissions — a dozen canvases across twenty years, the Psyche cycle their crown — made him the late Claude's true collaborator, and the constable's Roman palace hung the series as a suite; the diaspora that followed (Leigh Court among its stations) broke the suite but not the record: the Liber's late pages, dense with 'per il Contestabile Colonna', document the partnership through which the last manner reached its audience — a patron trusting an old painter into his strangest and greatest final decade.
View of Tivoli at sunset (formerly Cook collection): the temple-crowned gorge at the day's end — the sketching-site of a lifetime given its evening portrait; from the dispersed Doughty House Claudes, the site's memory travelling with the picture.
Documented work · 4 language editions Q19574562 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 87.1 by 151.3 cm, National Gallery, London; signed and dated 1664, painted for Prince Colonna. On a shore of unearthly stillness, Psyche sits alone — head on hand, the antique posture of melancholy — before the palace of Cupid: a castellated, porticoed pile rising from the trees above the sea, windows dark, terraces empty, the whole building holding its breath. The sea lies glass-calm to a soft horizon; deer graze the headland; the light is the late manner's silver-gold, cool as memory. Whether she waits before entering (the tale's beginning) or grieves after losing all (its middle), Claude does not say — and the ambiguity, surely deliberate, is the picture's engine. England named it better than iconography could: the Enchanted Castle.
No Claude — perhaps no landscape — has meant more to the poetry of desire. The composition is the œuvre's threshold theme at its most inward: not a queen at a lit stair but a soul outside a closed house, the light not a corridor to travel but an atmosphere to endure; and every device of the late style serves the inwardness — the emptied middle distance, the palace's blind grandeur, the sea's unanswering calm, the figure's smallness against architecture that knows something it will not say. Claude's Psyche is loved by a god she cannot look at; the picture renders that condition as landscape: everything present, nothing accessible — the world as the beloved's locked palace. It is the last transformation of his lifelong subject, and the profoundest: the embarkations' golden 'toward' has become, at the end, 'outside'.
The afterlife is literary history. Engraved in the eighteenth century (Vivares and Woollett's print spread the design through England), the picture entered the Romantic bloodstream: Keats saw the composition, wrote of the 'Enchanted Castle' in a verse letter with delighted awe, and, in the Ode to a Nightingale, distilled it into the most famous casements in English — "magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." The lines are the picture, transposed; generations have met the canvas already knowing it by heart. Its later history kept faith: through the great English collections (Loyd, and others) to the National Gallery in 1981 — a late, celebrated acquisition — where it now hangs near the 1648 pendants: the œuvre's morning and its evening on one wall, the queen descending to her ships and the soul locked out of the palace, forty years of Claude's light between them.
Psyche's posture — grief or patience, undecidable by design: cover the palace and she waits; cover the sea and she mourns; the palace's windows — dark in daylight, the picture's quiet impossibility and its whole Gothic future (every haunted house in Romantic art descends from these blind openings); the deer on the head, wildness reclaiming the garden's edge; the sea's calm — 'perilous' only in the poem, and the poem is right: stillness this complete is the landscape of the irrevocable; and the 1664 light itself, silver over gold, the late Claude's signature tonality — the hour, as always, carrying the meaning, and the hour here is one no clock names: the light of longing, invented on this canvas, on loan to English poetry ever since.
Moses before the Burning Bush (Bridgewater collection): the shepherd of Midian at the fire that does not consume — vocation's landscape: flock, mountain, and the small impossible light. Painted 1664, the Enchanted Castle's year; the Bridgewater Claudes, long on loan to Edinburgh, made this late sacred manner part of Scotland's inheritance.
Landscape with Erminia and the shepherds (Holkham Hall): Tasso's fugitive princess among the herdsmen, thirty-five years after the Morgan's early version — the subject aged from morning freshness into late-silver pastoral; Holkham's fourth Claude in this catalogue, the house's ensemble complete.
Landscape with Jacob, Rachel and Leah at the Well — 'Morning' (Hermitage): the first panel of the Petersburg Times of Day: the patriarch meets his brides-to-be at the well in dawn's wet silver — courtship at the hour of beginnings, the flocks watering as the light arrives. Painted 1666; the cycle's opening and, for Russian audiences two centuries running, the very image of morning. (The ensemble's story: see the Times of Day entry.)
Coast scene with the rape of Europa (Royal Collection): the shore-and-bull myth in its late royal version — the fourth œuvre sitting this catalogue meets, the game at the water now played in the 1660s' cooled light; the crown's mythological Claude, and the subject's silver-age statement beside Moscow's golden one.
Landscape with Psyche saved from drowning (David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie): the Psyche cycle's mercy-panel — the despairing girl drawn from the river by the god's arrangement, the sequel to the Enchanted Castle's lockout; that an Indiana university museum holds a canvas of Colonna's cycle is the Claude diaspora's neatest emblem.
Landscape with a piping shepherd (Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City): the solitary musician and his flock in late-1660s silver — Kansas City's second Claude, pairing with its Tiber mill: work and song, the pastoral's two occupations, mid-America.
Seascape with the embarkation of Carlo and Ubaldo (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto): Tasso's knights take ship to rescue Rinaldo from Armida's island — the Gerusalemme's enchanted voyage given the port treatment in the late manner; Canada's second Claude and the œuvre's one embarkation whose destination is sorcery: even here, the horizon gets the light.
Seascape with Ezekiel crying on the ruins of Tyre (Bridgewater collection): the prophet laments the merchant-city's fall — Tyre, the Bible's great harbour, given as ruined port in mourning light: the seaport formula turned elegy on itself, Claude's shipping and towers shown as what prophecy says all harbours become. The œuvre's darkest marine thought, in the Bridgewater group.
Hagar and Ishmael in the desert (Alte Pinakothek, Munich): the outcast mother and child at the wilderness spring — the Genesis mercy in its late statement, pendant to Munich's Banishment; Bavaria's pair tell the story's two acts, expulsion and rescue, in matched silver light.
The Banishment of Hagar (Alte Pinakothek, Munich): Abraham sends mother and son from the door at morning — the household's hardest scene, staged at the pastoral threshold with the desert waiting in light. With its companion above, Munich's matched pair of 1668; German Romantic viewers (the Pinakothek hung them prominently) read in them exile's whole theology, and Claude's biography whispers beneath: he knew something of leaving home at daybreak.
Egeria weeps over Numa (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples): the nymph who counselled a king mourns him into water — Ovid's fountain-elegy, staged in the late silver by the bay Claude had known as Wals's apprentice. Naples' own Claude: the city of his training keeps his late grief-myth, painted fifty years after he learned light on its shores.
Landscape with dancing figures (Stroganov Palace, Saint Petersburg): the ring-dance in the late manner, from the Stroganov collection — the Russian nobility's own Claude-collecting beside the crown's; the palace's picture extends Petersburg's holdings past the Hermitage walls.
Landscape with the nymph Egeria and King Numa (Capodimonte, Naples): the counsel before the grief — nymph and king in sacred conversation by the grove; Capodimonte's second panel of the Egeria matter, the pair giving Naples the myth's dialogue and its elegy together.
Landscape with the temple of Egeria (recorded at the Munich Central Collecting Point): the nymph's shrine in its grove — the Egeria family's third member, its modern file running through the post-war restitution machinery; the composition belongs with Capodimonte's pair, the myth's architecture completing its figures.
A classical landscape with cattle crossing a stream (Miles collection, Leigh Court): the ford at 1670 — the lifetime motif in late silver, from the Bristol-country collection whose Claudes fed the West of England's taste; the crossing subject's late-period representative in this catalogue.
Idyllic landscape at sunset (Alte Pinakothek, Munich): herds, water and the last gold of the day in the late manner — Munich's third Claude, the serene counterweight to its Hagar pair: Bavaria's holdings tell exile and evening in one room.
An Italianate coastal landscape: shore, tower and calm sea in the 1670s tonality — a late coast pastoral from the private-collection stratum of the œuvre, the mode's silver-age form.
Sea-port in Italy (formerly Sedelmeyer collection, Paris): a late harbour from the great Belle Époque dealer's stock — the Sedelmeyer Claudes fed the last age of private Claude-collecting; this port's file documents the market chapter of the reception history.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q26493116
Oil on canvas, 100 by 134 cm, National Gallery, London; signed and dated 1672. Aeneas, his father Anchises and son Ascanius stand with King Anius before the temple of Apollo on Delos — the sacred island where the wandering Trojans, Troy's smoke behind them, receive the oracle that will send them, by misreading and correction, to Italy; the priest-king gestures toward the shrine; the harbour waits below; and over the whole island scene stands the late Claude light at its most crystalline — pale, still, morning-cool, the air of prophecy. The picture opens the final Virgilian series: six Aeneid subjects painted in the last decade, of which this Delos is the National Gallery's representative and, for many, the series' perfect canvas.
Claude had painted Virgilian moments for decades; in the 1670s he read the epic end to end in paint — Delos, Crete's error corrected, Dido's Carthage, the Tiber's mouth, Pallanteum, the stag of Sylvia — and the late series is the œuvre's testament: the poet of exile-toward-destiny finally matched, at full length, by the painter of thresholds. Delos is the sequence's morning: the first oracle, hope's first architecture — and Claude gives it a rare structural wit, long noted: the temple's great portico quotes the round-towered harbours of his own early ports, as if the œuvre itself were being consulted; while the two trees Ovid's pilgrims knew (the palm and olive of Latona's labour, carefully included) root the prophecy in the island's oldest story. The figures — Anchises's age, the boy's attention, Aeneas's listening — are the elongated late race, and their delicacy suits the scene: this is history at its most provisional, a family between homes, told where to hope.
The picture has served criticism as the standard rebuttal of the 'senile Claude' tradition (the old charge that the last decade declined into pallor and mannerism): its drawing is firm, its architecture the most rigorous in the œuvre, its light not faded but refined — the tonal system tuned to intervals earlier work never attempted — and its poetry inseparable from exactly these qualities. Kitson and the Gallery's catalogues built the modern consensus on canvases like this: the late style is a style, chosen, coherent, and — in its union of glassy air, grave architecture and Virgilian patience — the summit of what this catalogue's essay calls the œuvre's long evening. Delos, morning-lit, is that evening's paradox in one frame: the last manner painting the epic's dawn.
The portico — count its debts: the early ports' towers, the Pantheon's mass, prophecy housed in the œuvre's own architecture; the sacred palm and olive by the shrine, botany as scripture; Ascanius watching (the boy who will end the series, and the œuvre, with an arrow ten years later — Claude surely knew the symmetry); the harbour's pale shipping below, the journey's next leg already rigged; and the light's temperature — set it beside the 1648 Sheba in the same building and read forty years in two skies: gold ripened to silver, arrival's promise become prophecy's patience, the same sun, further from noon, closer to meaning.
Landscape with Jacob wrestling the angel — 'Night' (Hermitage): the fourth and final Time of Day: Peniel's ford in moonlit dark, the patriarch locked with his unknowable opponent till daybreak — Claude's only true nocturne-struggle, the œuvre's rarest light bent to its rarest subject: blessing extracted by holding on. Painted 1672, a decade after the cycle's Noon; Petersburg's day closes contending, with dawn implied. (The set: see the Times of Day entry.)
Coast view with Perseus and the origin of coral (Holkham Hall): the hero rests after Medusa; her blood, meeting seaweed, hardens into the first coral — Ovid's strangest aetiology given a glass-calm late shore where nymphs marvel at the new red branches. Painted for Cardinal Massimi, later of Holkham's ensemble: the late manner at its most delicately fantastic — creation myth as beachcombing.
View of Delphi with a procession (Art Institute of Chicago): pilgrims wind toward the oracle's mountain sanctuary in pale 1670s light — the sacred-procession subject (an earlier version hangs in Rome's Doria) restated in the late grammar; Chicago's Claude, and the Midwest's window on the final manner: prophecy approached at walking pace.
A seaport at sunrise (Alte Pinakothek, Munich): the harbour theme's late-morning statement, painted 1674 — the port formula, forty years on from the Hermitage's 1634 sunset, its gold refined to the last decade's pale clarity; Munich's fourth Claude completes the Bavarian survey: exile, evening, and here the œuvre's oldest subject, still setting out.
The Arrival of Aeneas at Pallanteum (Miles collection, Leigh Court): the Aeneid's quietest landfall — the Trojan ships row up the Tiber to the site of future Rome, King Evander's modest settlement on the Palatine's slopes: the epic's most pregnant geography (the city before the city), painted for Prince Falconieri in the late Virgilian series with the œuvre's last river-light. The Leigh Court Claudes carried it to England, where its subject — empire's seed seen small — read like prophecy in the imperial century.
Aeneas's Farewell to Dido in Carthage (Hamburger Kunsthalle): the parting the Aeneid cannot forgive — the hero's fleet readying, the queen's harbour built of the very port-architecture Claude's Shebas taught, now staging abandonment; the late series' tragic panel, and Hamburg's second Claude. Turner's Dido pictures answer this canvas's matter as directly as his Carthage answered the 1648 Sheba: the two painters share even their grief's geography.
Jacob with Laban and his daughters (Dulwich Picture Gallery): the covenant-pastoral's late-silver sitting — the well, the flocks, the bargaining of loves, ten years after the Hermitage's Morning; Dulwich's second Claude, and London's specimen of the 1670s pastoral: the old subjects, the new pale air.
Landscape with the Voyage of Jacob (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown): the patriarch's whole household on the road — flocks, wives, waggons, the covenant migrating — in the late manner's wide silver morning: the pastoral epic of departure, painted by the eighty-year-old master of setting-out; the Clark's second Claude, closing its pair with the 1646 Rest.
A pastoral landscape (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth): the mode's late-silver form at cabinet scale — the Kimbell's second Claude, bracketing with its early Europa the whole arc from 1634 gold to 1677 pallor in one Texan collection.
Works retrieved from Wikidata (creator P170 = Q214074, with image P18); dates from P571 where present, otherwise supplied from the literature; locations from P195/P276; materials P186; dimensions P2048/P2049. Tier labels reflect how many Wikipedia language editions carry an article on the work. Images from Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge, arrow keys to step. Fetched 2026-08-20.