Italian Landscape

A wide, sweeping vista opens toward a luminous distance, with a wooded hill topped by a structure that recalls an ancient Roman temple and a darkened foreground curving away to the right. The view was built out of the Roman campagna, the countryside around Rome, and it belongs to the earliest years of Claude Lorrain’s career — before the harbour scenes and the great mythological landscapes on which his fame rests. French by birth, he spent his whole working life in Rome, and the invention usually credited to him is the golden, hazy light that orders these scenes and turns a real place into an ideal one. Generations of European landscape painters went to school on it, from the Dutch Italians and Rubens’s circle to Turner, who studied and copied Claude all his life and asked in his will that two of his own pictures hang beside the Frenchman’s in the National Gallery. The painting is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art.