II. The making of a manner: the Campagna years

The Rome to which Claude returned in 1627 gave him the two schools that actually formed him: the city's community of northern painters, and the countryside outside its gates.

The community first. The Flemish and Dutch painters in Rome — the Bentvueghels, 'birds of a feather', with their mock-pagan initiation rites and their taverns — included the circle that was inventing what history calls the Dutch Italianate landscape: Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, and above all, from 1629, Herman van Swanevelt, who lived for a time in the same house as Claude and whose sun-filled woodland scenes are so close to Claude's early work that attributions between them are still argued. A little later came Jan Both and Jan Asselijn, exporting the golden manner north. Claude was not a Bentvueghel — he was too sober, and Lorraine was Catholic — but he lived his whole professional life inside this northern colony, and it matters for understanding him: the painter of the Roman ideal was formed not in the Italian academies but in the immigrant quarter, among craftsmen-observers who prized the study of real light above the study of the antique. His closest friendships bear this out: Sandrart the German; the Fleming Jan Miel; later Poussin, the other permanent immigrant. When he was elected to the Accademia di San Luca in 1633, it was the establishment reaching out to the colony's rising star, not the other way round.

The countryside second, and more profoundly. Sandrart has left the essential eyewitness account, from shared expeditions in the early 1630s: Claude, he says, would be in the fields before daybreak and stay till night, watching the reddening of dawn, sunrise, sunset and the evening hours, and when he had contemplated one or another effect, he would immediately mix tints to correspond, hurry home, and apply them to the work he had in hand — achieving, Sandrart says, a truth of colour no one before him had reached. Modern scholarship has qualified the romance (the surviving oil sketches securely Claude's are few; the tint-mixing story may compress a more complicated studio practice) but confirmed the substance: several hundred surviving drawings — chalk, pen, and above all brush with brown and grey wash — record decades of systematic outdoor work in the Campagna, at Tivoli with its cascades and round temple, in the Sabine hills, along the Tiber. These sheets, mostly kept in bound books and never sold, are the hidden foundation of everything: not preparatory drawings in the ordinary sense (they rarely correspond to particular paintings) but a lifelong observational database — trees against light, water over stones, the exact darkening of foliage seen contre-jour, the structure of recession on an open plain — from which the studio compositions drew their unfailing truth of effect. When the twentieth century finally saw them exhibited, it recognised the procedure instantly, because Impressionism had made it doctrine: study outdoors, compose indoors. Claude had the doctrine complete by 1635, two hundred and forty years early.

Frescoes, ports, and the leap to fame

His first Roman earnings were a decorator's: landscape frescoes in palaces — for the Crescenzi, for Cardinal Muti — continuing Tassi's and Bril's trade. Easel pictures followed, and the market found them fast. The earliest dated works, from the late 1620s and early 1630s, already stake out the two poles of the career: the pastoral — herdsmen, cattle and travellers under great trees, a river winding to lit hills — and the seaport — an invented harbour framed by palace façades and towers, ships riding at anchor, and the sun low over the water in the picture's very centre. The port pictures were the sensation, and it is worth being precise about why. Low sun over water had been painted before — Elsheimer had done it small, Bril timidly. What Claude did was to organise the entire canvas as an apparatus for containing the sun: architecture stepped back in shadowed diagonals like theatre wings, ships' rigging strung as dark lace against the sky, water laid in horizontal bands that catch and grade the glare, and every figure turned to silhouette — so that the eye, entering the picture, travels down a corridor of shadow into the light, and the light, meeting it, comes forward. Contemporaries had never seen the transaction reversed like this: pictures had always been things light fell upon; a Claude seaport was a thing light came out of. By the mid-1630s the trick of it — which was not a trick but a system of tone — had made him famous.

The clientele that assembled was staggering, and its sequence tells the story of his rise. Around 1633–35 came the French: the ambassador Philippe de Béthune, then Urban VIII's own circle. For the Pope himself, or his Barberini nephews, Claude painted several landscapes in the later 1630s; the connection made him, in effect, an official painter of the papal court without office or obligation. Simultaneously — and this is the measure of his standing barely ten years after he was grinding colours — agents of Philip IV of Spain commissioned a large series of landscapes, including the great hermit-saint pictures now in the Prado, for the new Buen Retiro palace in Madrid: Claude and Poussin and their circle, decorating the Spanish crown's pleasure palace from Rome, in the largest landscape commission Europe had yet seen. After that the stream never stopped: Cardinal Bentivoglio, the Duc de Bouillon, princes Pallavicini and Colonna (his great patrons of the late years), French financiers, Roman prelates, and a growing English contingent whose successors would one day carry half the œuvre to the Thames valley. From about 1635 until his death, Claude had no need to seek a commission again; the demand was such that he kept a waiting list, and the prices — Baldinucci notes it with Florentine respect — were the highest ever paid for pure landscape.

The Book of Truth

Fame of this order, in a city full of hungry painters trained to imitate, produced the inevitable: forgeries and pastiches, sold as Claudes to buyers who could not tell. Baldinucci names the chief offender — Sébastien Bourdon, who allegedly saw a Claude in progress and painted his own version before the original was finished — and reports Claude's response. From about 1635–36, the painter kept a bound book of blue Roman paper in which he made a careful drawing after every picture that left the studio, inscribing on the back, in his rough hand, the purchaser or destination and later the date. He called it, according to Baldinucci, his libro d'invenzioni, or libro di verità: the Book of Truth. He kept it up, with the loyalty of a parish register, for forty-six years — some 195 drawings by the end, a nearly complete pictorial index of his production from 1635 to 1682, to which any doubtful 'Claude' could be brought for judgement.

The Liber Veritatis (the Latin name stuck when the book passed into English hands; it is now in the British Museum) is three things at once, each remarkable. It is the founding document of connoisseurship — the first systematic, artist-authenticated catalogue of an œuvre, a private institution invented by a barely literate man to defend the one asset he had, which was his name. It is an incomparable archive: purchasers, dates, destinations, second thoughts, occasionally prices — the working memory of a seventeenth-century studio, kept for half a century. And it is, almost incidentally, one of the supreme works of European draughtsmanship: because Claude drew each composition not as a dry record but as a finished work in pen and wash, translating each painting's light into monochrome, the Liber became — when Richard Earlom's mezzotints published it in 1777 — a drawing manual for all Europe, and the channel through which Claude's compositional science reached Turner, who answered it, characteristically, with a rival publication of his own, the Liber Studiorum. No other painter's anti-forgery ledger ever became a school.

It must be said plainly, because the Liber's existence sometimes suggests otherwise: the problem it addressed never went away. Claude was the most imitated landscape painter who ever lived — by contemporaries (Bourdon, Angeluccio, the mysterious 'A.C.'), by studio assistants (Giovanni Domenico Desiderii lived in his house for years), by whole later industries of English and Italian pasticheurs feeding the eighteenth-century mania. Museum storerooms worldwide hold 'Claudes' by the hundred; Röthlisberger's modern catalogue accepts about 250 paintings. The reader of this volume's catalogue page will meet the consequences repeatedly: works the Liber anchors, works it silently condemns, and the broad debatable land between studio and follower where attribution still moves picture by picture. Claude foresaw exactly this, which is why the book exists; three and a half centuries on, it remains the spine of his scholarship — the painter's own hand, still adjudicating.

A note on names and numbers closes the chapter, for the reader crossing to the catalogue. Claude's œuvre-boundary problems differ in kind from most masters': because he ran no teaching workshop of consequence, the debated zone holds few 'school pieces' in the Italian sense; it holds instead the imitations — contemporary and later — and the honest period copies after famous originals, made for owners who could not obtain one. Wikidata's records, which this catalogue follows, mix secure Liber-anchored masterpieces with pictures whose labels preserve old optimism; the entries flag the principal cases rather than adjudicate them all, and lean throughout on Röthlisberger's numeration (LV numbers cite the Liber drawing; R numbers his catalogue) as the scholarship's common coin. The reader should also know the œuvre's shape in round figures: about 250 accepted paintings, forty-four etchings, some 1,200 drawings including the Liber's 195 — a production, across sixty working years, that averages hardly four paintings a year: Claude was, like Vermeer after him, a slow perfectionist whose scarcity fed his price, and the Liber's steady pages are the metronome of one of art history's most unhurried careers.

II bis. The draughtsman: a second œuvre

The drawings deserve more than the paragraph the biography gave them, because they constitute a second œuvre — some 1,200 surviving sheets — and because the modern understanding of Claude rests on them.

They fall into families. First, the nature drawings: the outdoor sheets of the 1630s and 40s above all, in chalk, pen and brush — and it is the brush that astonishes. Working in brown wash, sometimes over the merest chalk indication, Claude laid in a tree's mass against light, a bend of the Tiber, a dark bridge over bright water, in broad, wet, unrevisable strokes that record not the object but the tonal event — precisely the skill the paintings run on. Sheets like the great Tivoli and Subiaco studies, or the trees seen contre-jour with the sun flaring behind them, look to modern eyes like nothing so much as Far Eastern ink painting or the wash drawings of the nineteenth century; nothing else in seventeenth-century Europe resembles them. Some were done on expeditions with companions — the young Dughet, Sandrart, Poussin's circle — many alone; a famous few carry his own notes of place and circumstance in the phonetic French-Italian of his hand. He kept them in bound books, lent them to no one, and used them for fifty years: when a late Virgilian coast needed a tree observed in 1640, the book supplied it. Second, the composition studies: workshop drawings toward paintings, where invented architecture is squared for enlargement and figure groups rehearsed. Third, the Liber itself, a genre of one. And fourth, in the final decades, a group with no parallel: the great late finished drawings — independent works in pen and wash of Virgilian subjects, made for their own sake or for intimates, in which the trembling gout-marked line achieves a spiritualised delicacy scholars compare to late Rembrandt and late Titian: the draughtsman's equivalent of the last paintings' silver air.

The collections tell the afterlife: the British Museum holds the Liber and hundreds of sheets (the bequests of Payne Knight and others — England collected the drawings as it collected everything Claude); Chatsworth's albums, the Louvre, the Morgan, Haarlem's Teylers hold most of the rest. Their publication across the twentieth century — culminating in Röthlisberger's 1968 corpus — did more than add a medium to Claude's file: it inverted the caricature. The painter Ruskin convicted of never looking at nature turns out to have looked at nature more systematically, over more decades, in more weathers and hours, than any European artist before the nineteenth century; the 'formulas' of the paintings stand revealed as compressions of an enormous empirical archive. Connoisseurship's verdict has followed: for many modern critics and not a few painters, the drawings are the summit of Claude — the place where the observation is still wet, before the studio cooled it into gold.