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53
Claude Lorrain Return of the Herds During Stormy Weather Etching, c. 1650-1652 6 ¼" x 8 ½" |
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During
the Italian Mannerist period, picturesque panoramas became popular. As
emerging artists studied and copied these pictures, they were reproduced
in Rome and abroad. Artists follow a kind of formula:
Bits of natural scenery treated picturesquely, vast stretching of country receding in powerful, but loosely articulated, rhythms (incorporating) antique ruins…and the sometimes the silhouette of a lone wayfarer, a peasant woman running after a fox…This serves to enliven the scene with a more or less trivial anecdote an to indicate the scale of the landscape. (Thiller and Chatlet).The landscape tradition which evolved in France during the seventeenth century was derived from this style. Its most famous practitioner was Claude Gellee, also known as Claude Lorrain, named after the area of France where he was born. Claude spent most of his life in Italy. He went there as a young man to apprentice a pastry chef in the house of Agostino Tassi, a famous Italian artist. Instead of pursuing the pastry career, he began to study pastry under Tassi. When he was twenty, Claude studied etching under the Frenchman Jacques Callot. Callot, in Florence at this time, was a leading etcher who had developed several techniques that improved the process of etching. After learning how to etch, Claude settled in Rome, where he studied the hills and pastures of the Roman Campagna. Sometimes he would sit for hours to observe the fluctuations of light. Through the success of his work, he quickly emerged as one of the most famous artists in Italy at the time and devoted himself to the creation of the ideal landscape. Throughout his life he would do more than 300 landscape paintings. His 51 etchings are perhaps lesser known. Thirty of these are based on his own paintings. In recent years, his talent as an etcher has been receiving more notice. Return of the Herds During Stormy Weather is probably the first etching completed by Claude when he returned to printmaking after an interruption of about twelve years. In the last thirty years of his life, he executed only three other prints, two in 1662 and one in 1663. The Return of the Herds During Stormy Weather is probably the second of three states. The first state is loose and light, lacking the in-depth detail of the later states. The signature "Claudius Gelle Fecit Roma" is missing from the WFU print because appeared in the area of the print that was trimmed. In his composition, Claude attempted to create an ideal landscape. In Return of the Herds, the season is summer turning to Autumn; the trees are changing color. The storm was a popular subject during these years, and here it suggests transition. Claude's manner of etching, with his swirling lines are full of great detail and movement. His control over the medium is seen in both the architecture and the landscape. Figures, admittedly secondary in importance, were often introduced to give scale and narrative to the ideal world which he created. Although this work is isolated in terms of its chronological date, Claude repeated the motifs of livestock and pastorals in other paintings and etchings throughout his career. Patricia Schnably (1994) References
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