V. The two Frenchmen of Rome: Claude and Poussin

No account of Claude escapes the comparison with Nicolas Poussin, and none should: the parallel lives are the seventeenth century's own diagram of what landscape could be. Two Frenchmen, born six years apart, both permanently transplanted to Rome, both painting for the same learned clientele, both walking the same Campagna — Sandrart records the sketching parties: Claude, Poussin, himself and Pieter van Laer, out among the ruins — and both buried in Roman churches within a few streets of each other. Poussin the Norman was everything Claude was not: deeply read, philosophical, articulate in letters that constitute a body of art theory, a painter of the figure first and landscape late. When Poussin turned seriously to landscape around 1648 — the great years of the Phocion pictures and the Four Seasons — he built his scenes as he built his histories: geometric masses, moral gravity, nature as the architecture of Stoic order. The result is the standard textbook antithesis, and for once the textbook is right: Poussin's landscape addresses the mind through the eye; Claude's addresses the eye so completely that the mind follows helpless. Poussin constructs space; Claude dissolves it in air. Poussin's light is even and intellectual, the illumination of a proposition; Claude's is hourly, directional, wet with atmosphere — the light of a particular evening that never existed.

The contemporaries knew they had a pair. Patrons commissioned from both; theorists — beginning with their friend and mutual patron Cassiano dal Pozzo's circle — debated their virtues as Rome had once debated Raphael and Michelangelo, design against colour, thought against sight. The eighteenth century canonised the trio of classical landscape — Poussin, Claude, and Salvator Rosa the wild Neapolitan — as three temperaments: the heroic, the beautiful, the sublime or savage; English collectors bought all three and English writers (James Thomson's Castle of Indolence has the famous stanza) turned the trio into shorthand for the moods of nature itself. Within the trio, though, the division of empire was never in doubt: Poussin ruled the academies, Claude ruled desire. It was Claude whom collectors fought over, Claude whose name named the tourist's mirror, Claude around whom gardens were built. The academic theorists who ranked history painting above landscape had, in Claude, their permanent embarrassment: a painter of the lowest genre commanding the highest prices and the deepest feeling, proof — two centuries before the Impressionists made it doctrine — that the hierarchy described institutions, not experience.

VI. A life in the Via Margutta: the man and the late years

Of the man himself, the documents and biographers paint a consistent, unspectacular, likeable portrait. He lived for decades in the same houses near Santa Maria del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna, in the parish records as a householder of good standing; he kept servants, a studio assistant or two (Desiderii for many years; later his own nephews), and an open door to the northern colony. Sandrart describes his conversation as slow and his mind unbookish, then spends pages on his method with the reverence owed a sage: the judgement of Europe eventually agreed with both halves. He was pious without display, generous to the poor of the French community, a member of the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon; his will and its codicils — carefully studied by modern scholars — show a man of substantial but not princely wealth, lending sums, holding luoghi di monte (papal bonds), providing for relatives in Lorraine he had not seen in half a century, and for the two people of his Roman household: his nephew Jean, and Agnese.

Agnese Gellée, born about 1653, is the biography's one flare of private mystery: his natural daughter — the mother unknown, the fact undisputed, acknowledged in successive wills with increasing tenderness — raised in his house, unmarried at his death, principal heir with the nephew of his estate and his books of drawings. Around her the archives are silent and biographers have had the sense to stay so too; what remains is the household itself: the old painter, the daughter, the nephew, the drawings in their bound volumes — the Liber among them — in the quiet upper rooms above one of Europe's most fashionable streets, while the coaches of the Grand Tour rattled below carrying the Englishmen who would one day own everything.

His health gave way slowly — gout, the painters' and patrons' disease, tormented his last twenty years and shows in the late drawings' trembling pen — but the work never stopped and never coarsened; it did the opposite, which is the astonishment of the late period. From the 1660s the pictures grow larger, stranger, more rarefied: the tonality cools from gold to silver-blue; the compositions empty and widen; the figures elongate into a deliberate, almost Gothic slenderness (scholars invoke the precedent of late Raphael's grace or call it simply Claude's own late mannerism); and the subjects turn from setting-out to arrival, from feast to threshold. The Enchanted Castle of 1664 — Psyche alone on the shore before Cupid's silent palace — became for the Romantics the very image of longing (Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas" remembers it); the Aeneid series painted for Prince Falconieri and others in the 1670s gives Virgil's exiles coasts of glassy calm that seem outside time; and the very last canvas, Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, finished in 1682 for Prince Colonna, suspends the fatal arrow forever in a world of pale enormous air — the eighty-two-year-old painter ending, with perfect appropriateness, on the instant before loss. He died on 23 November 1682 and was buried in Trinità dei Monti above the Spanish Steps, in the heart of the quarter he had inhabited for fifty-five years; in 1840 the French removed his remains to their national church of San Luigi dei Francesi, where the inscription calls him the prince of landscape painters. Poussin's tomb is a short walk away; the Campagna they drew together begins beyond the gates.

One more inventory of the studio's end belongs here. The posthumous record — wills, the estate's division, the fate of the books — shows the drawings passing to the nephews and Agnese, then, within decades, into the stream of the market: the Liber to the Odescalchi, then (by 1770) to the Dukes of Devonshire and at last, in 1957, to the British Museum; the nature-drawing albums scattered through the great eighteenth-century cabinets. The paintings' diaspora the next chapter follows. What did not survive is worth a sentence too: no letters of substance, no treatise, no self-portrait securely from his hand (the frontispiece portraits of the biographies derive from a drawing by his friend Sandrart); the man remains, by every written measure, the most reticent of the great painters — which has had the paradoxical effect of leaving him the best documented as an artist, since the Liber and the drawings speak, in his own hand, about the only subject he ever cared to address: what the light was doing, on a given day, over the Campagna or the sea.

VI bis. The fortunes of the pictures: patrons, prices, and the English translation

The œuvre's travels are a subject in themselves — no body of painting has a more concentrated migration history — and they shaped what Claude means, so the essay gives them a chapter.

The first owners were the international elite of baroque Rome and its client courts: the Barberini and their circle under Urban VIII; Philip IV's Buen Retiro series; French ambassadors and financiers shipping pictures to Paris (where the young Louis XIV's ministers hung them — the Louvre's superb holdings descend partly from the royal collection); and the Roman princely houses — Pallavicini, Chigi, Altieri, Colonna, Falconieri — whose orders dominate the late Liber pages. Claude's prices in his lifetime were the wonder of the trade: Baldinucci reports commissions at 500 and more scudi at a time when able painters worked for tens, and the waiting list meant patrons contracted years ahead. He died rich enough to endow his heirs and correct in his accounts; the Liber's marginal names — kings, popes, cardinals, princes — are the address book of European power for half a century.

Then, across the eighteenth century, the great translation: England. The Grand Tour put the milordi in Rome with agents, cash and time; Roman families, their fortunes ebbing, sold; and by degrees the Claudes crossed the Channel in one of the largest voluntary art transfers in history. The trophies became national events: the Bouillon Claudes — the Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba and the Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, painted as pendants in 1648 for the Duc de Bouillon — reached London in 1803 and were secured for the new National Gallery at its founding in 1824, among the most expensive pictures in the world; the Altieri Claudes (the Sacrifice to Apollo and the Landing of Aeneas, painted for the Altieri pope's family) arrived in 1799 under naval escort in wartime and sold for the greatest price yet paid in England for pictures; Sir George Beaumont carried his little Hagar and the Angel with him in his carriage, literally could not part with it, and made it foundation stone number one of the National Gallery's collection. By 1850 England held — as it still holds — the greatest concentration of Claudes on earth, and the possession had consequences beyond pride: it was in London, not Rome or Paris, that Turner and Constable could study him daily; the English landscape school, and through it the whole modern history of the genre, grew up inside a national gallery of Claude.

The pictures' meanings travelled with them. In Rome they had been furnishings of learned magnificence; in England they became instruments of self-fashioning — the Whig grandee's window onto the classical past he claimed to steward — and then, as the gardens and the tourists and the mirrors did their work, something stranger: a standard for correcting reality. It is the only case in art history where connoisseurship reorganised geography — valleys flooded, hills planted, temples built, so that a Wiltshire banker or a Yorkshire earl could walk into the picture he owned. When the American museums assembled their Claudes in the twentieth century (the Met's Trojan Women, Washington's Judgment of Paris, the Kimbell's and Getty's pastorals), they were buying, knowingly, the taste that had built the Anglosphere's parks; and when the crowds in those museums pause today at the golden distances, they are standing at the end of a chain of desire — Rome's, Paris's, London's, everyone's — that the quiet man of the Via Margutta forged link by link in paint.