Claude Gellee Le Lorrain

LOT 50 CLAUDE GELLÉE, CALLED LE LORRAIN 1600 - 1682 THE DANCE ON THE RIVER-BANK (M. 13) Etching, circa 1634, a good impression of the sixth B state (of seven), on paper with a Pascal Lamb watermark (M. 19) Plate: 131 by 201mm; 5 1/8 by 7 7/8 in Sheet: 142 by 213mm; 5 5/8 by 8 3/8 in

Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain (Champagne 1600-1682 Rome) A wooded landscape pen and brown ink, brown wash heightened with white on blue paper, brown ink framing lines 8 7/8 x 11 7/8 (22.5 x 30.1 cm.) Probably Queen Christina of Sweden; thence by descent to Cardinal Decio Azzolini and Marchese Pompeo Azzolini. Prince Livio Odescalchi, by descent. with Artemis Fine Arts. John R. Gaines; Sotheby's, New York, 17 November 1986, lot 16. PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION M. Roethlisberger, 'Neun Zeichnungen von Claude Lorrain', Du, July 1973, p. 512. This drawing of an unidentified wooded vista of the Roman countryside is one of the most lyrical and accomplished of Claude's pure landscape compositions. First published by Marcel Roethlisberger in 1973 who considers it '...one of the most ravishing examples from what we call Claude's nature drawings...' (correspondence, 3 October 2012), it was once part of the so-called Wildenstein Album which included some of the finest drawings in Claude's oeuvre. The present sheet is thought to have been executed around 1640-42 when Claude was at the height of his powers and most active as an observer and recorder of the Roman campagna. It is an exceptional example of the 17th Century classical tradition. It is in a remarkable state of preservation owing to the fact that it was kept in an album for over three centuries, and has a provenance extending back almost to the artist's lifetime. Claude is known to have made drawings and even oil sketches while exploring the Roman countryside as early as the 1630s and he was most prodigious in his output of landscape drawings during the 1640s when this drawing was made. The German artist Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688) wrote about visiting the countryside with Claude in the late 1620s and early 1630s when Claude made sketches in oil (none of which is extant). The art historian Filippo Baldinucci (1624-1696) after visiting Claude at the end of his life when he was debilitated by gout, wrote about sketching expeditions Claude made earlier in his career. Throughout his lifetime Claude's technique and method as a draughtsman varied depending on the purpose of the drawing. The present sheet can be seen as a sort of hybrid between the purely observed landscape done in situ, and the more composed, idealized scenes deriving from a more literary, Arcadian tradition. As is often the case with his landscape drawings, this sheet is not connected to any known painting by Claude, nor does it have an inscription that would identify its location or date of execution. Even Claude's most seemingly obvious plein air sketches display a technical complexity and visual sophistication that belie a purely spontaneous, rapid execution. In the present sheet, the lightly but confidently applied brown pen lines are augmented by varying gradations of brown wash and strokes of white bodycolor highlights. Together they create a broadly atmospheric effect where light and shadow play across the foliage, tree bark, hills and sky. Much of the pen drawing could have been done outdoors (there is no evidence of any black chalk underdrawing), with perhaps the wash and white heightening added by him in the studio. Certain pictorial elements -- the brown ink framing lines, the empty wedge of land in the foreground before the unfurling landscape -- also suggest a composed thoughtfulness to the scene. However, the dappled light across the page indicate immediate observation and execution. This drawing can be compared with several other superb wooded landscape studies from the early 1640s such as ones in the British Museum, Teyler Museum, Haarlem, and Uffizi (M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: the drawings, Berkeley, 1968, I, pp. 185, 201; II, pl. 417, 419, 472r). It is especially close in layout to the Uffizzi drawing in the framing-like effect of the tree branches and leaves in the foreground which open onto a hilly landscape beneath a cloud-filled sky. However, the present sheet is distinct from the above-mentioned sheets and is exceptional as a pure landscape drawing to be done on blue paper with white heightening. There are several examples of wash landscape drawings on blue or tinted paper (and nearly half the Liber Veritatis was executed on blue paper) which Professor Roethilsberger describes Claude using '...for particularly beautiful drawings or for special effects of the light, and not for sketches' (M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Wildenstein Album, Paris, 1962, p. 27; see nos. 9, 38, 42). On the other hand pen and ink and wash landscape sketches on blue paper with white heightening are exceedingly rare. He used this particular combination more frequently in highly finished compositional drawings which also included figures or mythological subjects. Most of Claude's drawings were still in his possession when he died in 1682, and they were assembled -- either during his lifetime or soon after by his heirs -- into twelve bound albums of about 80 sheets each. Since the 17th Century only the Liber Veritatis (British Museum) remains intact. The present sheet was once part of the so-called Wildenstein Album which came to light when a bound group of sixty drawings by Claude was acquired by the Wildentein Gallery in 1960, and first published by Roethlisberger (op. cit., 1962). The drawings in the Wildenstein Album span Claude's entire career and are noted for their exceptional quality. They include compositional drawings, nature and figure studies. As such, they are thought to have been compiled as an overview of his career possibly by Claude or his heirs. In the 17th Century it came into the possession of Queen Christina of Sweden (1629-1689). The album subsequently passed to her heir, Cardinal Decio Azzolini (1623-1689), and was then sold to Livio Odescalchi, Duke of Bracciano (1652-1713) in whose family it remained until the last century. The album is believed to be one of those recorded in the 1713 Odescalchi inventory. The total number of extant drawings corresponds to the number '81' which is inscribed on the first page of the album. In addition to the sixty sheets bought by Wildenstein, the original album included eight drawings which were sold to the London dealer Hans Calmann around 1957/58 and thirteen additional drawings. This drawing was from the latter group and was acquired by John Gaines (1929-2005) in whose sale it appeared in 1986, its last appearance at auction. We are grateful to Professor Marcel Roethlisberger for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.

Lot Description Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain (Champagne 1600-1682 Rome) An extensive landscape with figures dancing and others resting under a tree in the foreground, their cattle resting beyond oil on canvas 38¼ x 48½ in. (97.2 x 123.3 cm.) Provenance Private collection, England. Literature M. Roethlisberger, 'Additional Works by Goffredo Wals and Claude Lorrain', The Burlington Magazine, 121, no. 910, January 1979, p. 24, fig. 33. Exhibited Munich, Haus der Kunst, Im Light von Claude Lorrain, 1983, no. 3 (entry by M. Roethlisberger). Tokyo, Museum of Western Art, Claude Lorrain and the Ideal Landscape, 1998, no. 25. View Lot Notes › Born to poverty in Lorraine around 1604, orphaned early and barely educated (he trained as a pastry chef), Claude traveled to Rome as a servant around 1618; through assiduous study and near constant sketching in the Roman countryside, he would forge an original genre of pastoral landscape and transform himself into the most successful landscape painter in Europe, with commissions from the Pope, the French ambassador and the King of Spain. By the later 1640s, at the pinnacle of his career, Claude established a vision of landscape that was grand, if not sublime: sweeping, orderly and dignified, but also lush, atmospheric and full of small and unexpected delights. "Pure as Italian air", observed the British painter J-M-W Turner in 1811, "calm, beautiful and serene springs forward the works and with them the name of Claude Lorrain." The rural dance is the only elaborately worked up theme that occurs repeatedly in Claude's youthful production of the 1630s: in eight paintings (including the present one), three etchings and several drawings. The first painting on this theme is likely a canvas in the Saint Louis Art Museum which probably dates from the early 1630s; the best-known versions of the subject are a smaller canvas purchased by Cardinal Leopold de'Medici in the 17th century, which has been in the Uffizi since 1796; and a variant of approximately the size of the present painting that formerly belonged to the Duke of Westminster (Christie's, London, 7 December 2010, lot 51, sold $2,057,250). As Roethlisberger has observed, the present painting is more generous in the space it provides for the dancing figures and approaches the scene from a higher viewpoint than either the Uffizi or Westminster canvases. Our painting, he believes, preceded those pictures and served as their model for the figures. The number and arrangement of figures varies in each composition, but all of them include a dancing couple dressed in colorful Italian peasant costume, with music-making onlookers. The setting sun, partially hidden by trees on the left, tints the sky a golden yellow, and the overall effect is of the charming and happy dancers overwhelmed and dwarfed by majestically rising trees, expansive landscape and open sky. The composition with a central group of trees in the middle distance occurs in other paintings by Claude in the early 1630s, notably the famous Pastoral Landscape in Rotterdam. The painting and its variants predate the inception of the Liber Veritatis, and a copy of it is not included in that record book of Claude's compositions; however, the artist's own etching, Landscape with Country Dance, which exists in multiple states, is closely related to the present painting.

Lot Description Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain (Champagne 1600-1682 Rome) La Tempête: A Mediterranean costal landscape with rowing boats and a galley in rough seas, a seaside temple and a tower, other vessels beyond oil on copper, octagonal 11 x 13¾ in. (28 x 35 cm.) Provenance Lord George Cavendish (according to the inscription on the reverse). The grandfather of the present owner, and by descent. Pre-Lot Text THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN View Lot Notes › This previously unpublished work would appear to be a new discovery in the oeuvre of Claude Lorrain, and possibly one of his earliest painted works. The combination of an octagonal format with a copper support was particularly favoured by the artist, and recurs in these dimensions in a number of examples, including the Pastoral landscape in Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales (28 x 34.5 cm.; see M. Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, New Haven and London, 1961, I, no. LV11, II, fig. 44), the Pastoral landscape with Castel Gandolfo (30.5 x 37.5 cm.; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum; op. cit., I, no. LV35, II, fig. 90), the Landscape with the port of Santa Marinella (30 x 37 cm.; Paris, Petit Palais, Collection Dutuit; op. cit., I, no. LV46, II, fig. 111); the early Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (28 x 33.7 cm.; the Duke of Westminster; op. cit., I, no. 241, II, fig. 14), and others. Claude seems to have enjoyed the octagonal framing of his compositions particularly on this small scale, and the octagonal coppers generally belong to the first decade of his independent career. Chronologically, the Rest on the Flight is signed and dated 1631; LV11 has been placed by Röthlisberger in 1636-1637; LV35 in 1639, and LV46 in 1639-1640. After a period in the studios of Goffredo Wals in Naples, Agostino Tassi in Rome and Claude Deruet in Lorraine, Claude established himself as an independent artist in 1627-8. A few years later he began to keep what he called his Liber Veritatis, a drawn record of his painted works. Most of Claude's painted compositions correspond to a drawing in the Liber (hence the LV numbers in the catalogue raisonné), but some early works, such as the Westminster Rest on the Flight - as well as the present copper - are not included. Nevertheless, the present composition can be closely linked to Claude's earliest dated etching, La Tempête, the first state of which is inscribed 'CLAUD. IELLE.I.V.F.ROMAE.1630' (L. Mannocci, The Etchings of Claude Lorrain, New Haven and London, 1988, no. 6, pp. 50-9), the preparatory drawing for which also survives, itself inscribed 'CLAV IV' and dated 'CLAVDIO W 1630 ROM' (London, British Museum; M. Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968, no. 46). We are grateful to Dr. Jon Whiteley for confirming the attribution on the basis of first-hand inspection, noting that it has always seemed likely that a painting such as the present one lay behind the early etching. While neither the preparatory drawing nor the etching precisely correspond to the composition of the painting, all of the key elements recur - the floundering galley, with its distinctive stern; the vaguely-defined landmass in the foreground; the densely wooded coastline to one side of the composition; the crenellated tower in the distance; the sail ships struggling against the wind in the background. The motif of the rowing boat with three figures struggling to keep it upright appears in modified but recognisable form in the foreground; this element has been crudely and selectively overpainted and would benefit from a sensitive cleaning. Of great interest is the pentiment at the right of the painted work, barely visible under the painted sky, which must belong to a very early stage of the creative process, and which seems to indicate some indecision as to whether the mass of buildings should be at left or right - here too, one can almost make out what is apparently a crenelated tower, larger in scale (in keeping with that in the drawing and etching). Although no other painted treatment of a stormy sea by Claude is extant, it is clear that Claude returned to the theme more than once: Sandrart, his early biographer, records a lost or untraced fresco painted in circa 1630 for the house of the Muti, in Rome, depicting a seastorm; while a number of drawings in the Liber Veritatis, the painted prototypes for which are untraced, also depict tempests (LV 33, 72 and 74). This would have been a natural subject for Claude early in his career, when the example of Tassi's windswept marine paintings will have been fresh in his mind; another possible source of inspiration, as noted by Marco Chiarini in 1984, are those of Filippo Napoletano (see Mannocci, op. cit., p. 57). In 1627, one his way back to Rome from Lorraine, Claude lived through a storm at sea; in his biography, Baldinucci tells us that 'finally, after having suffered many terrible storms at sea, and inconvenience on that long journey, he was once again in Rome' (Mannocci, loc. cit.). The strong stylistic resemblance to early painted works by Claude is clear - for example, in the foliage at left, which can be closely compared to that in the Westminster Rest on the Flight, arguably of about the same date as the present work, and especially in the beautiful treatment of the sky, its delicately applied, staccato highlights along a horizontal axis in the clouds, is a characteristic touch, recurring for example in the Landscape with a herdsman and shepherdess signed and dated '163[4?]' (oil on canvas, 49.5 x 38.5 cm.; private collection). Like the copper Tempest, this work is not included in the Liber, but corresponds in reverse to an etching of circa 1630. The inscription on the verso implies that the picture was owned either by Lord George Cavendish (d. 1794), second son of William, 3rd Duke of Devonshire, who inherited Holker Hall in Lancashire in 1753 from his mother's nephew, Sir William Lowther, 3rd Bt., or his own nephew and heir Lord George Cavendish (1754-1834), who was in 1831 created Earl of Burlington. Shortly before his death Sir William Lowther obtained the celebrated Parnassus by Claude (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); he owned a further picture by this artist and his Cavendish successors acquired two more. Perhaps because of its small size, there is no record that this picture was at Holker, but it is possible that it was kept either in a London house or at Compton Place, which was inherited by the younger Lord George's wife, Lady Elizabeth Compton.

CLAUDE GELLÉE, LE LORRAIN La Fuite en Egypte. Etching, circa 1630-33. 106x171 mm; 4 1/4x6 3/4 inches, small margins. Mannocci's first state (of 4), with the blank spaces along the upper border line and with the border line incomplete. Fleur-de-lys in a double circle with the letters A and N watermark (Mannocci 18). A superb, early impression of this very scarce etching. Mannocci 9. Estimate $3,000-5,000