Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain

Childhood

Claude Lorrain was born in the village of Chamagne of northeastern France. His tombstone shows that his born year was 1600, but according to historians, it is 1604 or 1605. Lorrain spent much of his life in Italy. He was the third son among five sons in a low-income family. He lost both of his parents when he was twelve and stayed with his printmaker brother in Freiburg; during that time, he got trained as a pastry chef and moved to Rome to pursue a career.

Education and Early training

When Lorrain was in Rome, he started to develop an interest in art. According to one of his biographers, Lorrain learned about art from a German artist in Naples. In Rome, he learned from Agostino Tassi, a leading Italian artist of landscapes and illusionistic architectural artwork. Under Agostino, Lorrain developed his art base, including his taste for landscape, coastal scenes, and understanding the perspective.

Lorrain left Rome and came to Nancy in 1625 and worked there for around a year as an assistant to Claude Deruet. He helped Derurt by painting the background of a Series of Frescos in a church. Lorrain returned to Rome in 1626, and for the next 25 years, he lived in a house close to the Trinita Dei Monti; he moved to via Del Babuino in 1650, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Lorrain stayed away from the city's academic circles, but in 1633 he joined the academy of Saint Luke. This academy was an association under Papal influence. In the early career of Lorrain, he traveled to various places in Italy, Germany, and France, including Genoa, Venice, Bavaria, and Marseilles, to study landscape deeply. He started making rapid sketches and oil paintings. His first famous painting was a landscape with castles and peasants. This piece is now at the Philadelphia museum and shows highly personal style and great technique.

Lorrain rarely interacted with any artists, but Nicolas Poussin was pretty close to him. Lorrain was solitary in his forties, and he never got married. He adopted a daughter who lived with him in Rome. Due to lack of formal education, he was always presumed to be academically ignorant, but his paintings reflect substantial knowledge of the Bible and classical literature.

  Mature period

During the 1630s, Lorrain gained popularity for his work and started getting commissions from nobility and merchant across Europe. He was known as one of the leading painters of Italy for his landscape. Lorrain valued his art and charged high prices for his work. At times the agents used to initiate the sale process. At that time, Lorrain included more human figures in his art, which was very unusual for a landscape painter. Some critics criticized this idea, but some thought that Lorrain was developing his skills. He had ideas about the value of his work, so he published a record of his production to protect his artworks from fraud. It contains 195 drawings in chronological order, now residing at the British Museum.

Late period

During his later years, his art production slowed down significantly; however, they showed stylistic developments and were larger, including great details of his subjects. During his last years, his work also tended towards cooler colors that made his art very precious. In his time, Lorrain's work inspired the artists of Rome and across Western Europe. Particularly his compositional style and palette had a great influence on young artists. The true significance became clearer in the end years of his career.