Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain Chamagne, Lorraine 1604/5 (?) - 1682 Rome

Painted by the artist most likely for M. Dauby, Grenoble;
Anonymous sale, Paris, Pailet, 20 March 1787, lot 192, as Sunset together with a pendant (see note above);
Perhaps Lord Bristol;
With George Townley, by 1837;
Anonymous sale, London, Foster's, 21 April 1847, lot 120, to Perkins;
Lt.-Col. Lloyd-Ellis, London;
With Julius Weitzner, New York, from whom purchased in 1931 by
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, by whom sold in 1954 to
Hirschl and Adler Galleries, Inc., New York, from whom purchased by the present owner in 1956.

Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress: International Loan Exhibition of Fine Arts, 1 June - 1 November 1993.

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works..., London 1837, Vol. VIII, p. 213, cat. no. 40, 354;
Bulletin of the Smith College Museum of Art, May 1932, No. 13, reproduced on cover, no. 1;
Parnassus, vol IV, 1932, p. 34, reproduced only;
The Connoisseur, vol LXXXIX, 1932, p. 211, reproduced only;
The Fine Arts, vol XVIII, 1932, p. 41, reproduced only
Smith College Museum of Art Catalogue, 1937, p. 21, reproduced p. 88;
M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, London 1961, Vol. I, p. 170-2, reproduced Vol. II fig. 100 (cat. no. 40);
P. Rosenberg, France in the Golden Age. Seventeenth-Century French Paintings in American Collections, exhibition catalogue, 1982, p. 359, cat. no. 12, reproduced. 

Claude is perhaps the most enduringly admired and imitated landscape painter of the western tradition; his compositions have inspired artists as diverse as Turner and Vernet (and even landscape architects like Capability Brown who attempted to create actual, living vistas to rival Claude's two dimensional compositions).  He was patronized and later collected by the international elite- popes, cardinals, princes and kings- on a scale that was rivaled in his day only by Rubens and van Dyck.  Working for most of his life in Rome, Claude eschewed the earlier, somewhat drier, landscape style of his master Agostino Tassi and other contemporaries such as the Fleming Paulus Bril and, under the influence of the Carracci school-- particularly Domenichino-- reinvented the idealized, Arcadian landscape.   Using drawings taken from nature, in which he anticipated the painters of both the Barbizon and Impressionist schools, Claude was able to compose his landscapes with great naturalism, making revolutionary use of light and dark, form and space, to create idealized pictures which represented a nature that was more perfect than nature itself.

During his own lifetime, Claude's pre-eminence in the field of paessagio was such that after his initial successes a number of anonymous imitators appeared in Rome painting in his style.   His early biographer Baldinucci noted that the affable artist's studio was often crowded with admirers and other painters, among whom were those who began to forge his work.  The most famous incident involved no less a artistic figure than his fellow countryman Sebastien Bourdon, who was plagiarizing Claude as early as 1634.  A number of such unpleasant occurrences caused Claude to keep records of his compositions before they left his studio.  Claude drew these ricordi in a bound folio which he called his "Libro di Verità" (the Liber Veritatis, as it is more commonly called: the "Book of Truth" ), now in the collection of the British Museum, London.  The Liber, while not a complete catalogue of the artist's painted oeuvre, is a unique document covering most of the Claude's career, and was kept up until the artist's death.

The Pastoral Landscape with Huntsmen is number 40 in the Liber, and although the last digit of the date in the painting's signature is somewhat obscured, it should date to 1639, when Claude was at the height of his artistic powers and international fame.  The drawing is richly composed, worked out in ink and wash on blue prepared paper, then heightened with white (see Fig. 1).    The composition of the drawing differs from the final picture in a number of ways (this is by no means uncommon, particularly among the drawings in the first half of the Liber).  The painting is much more expansive in conception, with a group of robust, lush trees standing at the left edge of the composition, merely hinted at in the drawing.  The tree at the right edge of the drawing stands further into the painting, and the disposition of the round tower and the mill in the middle ground are switched.  In the foreground, the resting hunstmen, the purported subject of the picture, have been changed very slightly, as have the architectural fragments that they rest against.  Such differences between the drawings in the Liber and the final paintings they record are not unusual, particularly in the first half of the book (see M. Roethlisberger, op. cit., vol. I, p. 120, footnote 5, where over two dozen examples are listed).

Perhaps more interesting are the changes that Claude made in the painting itself.  His original conception for the figures at the center of the composition was considerably different.  Under x-ray examination (see Fig. 2), three more figures appear, all women.  Two women walking to the left were in front of the herdsman and his mate that are still present; one turns to the right to converse with her now ghostly companion.  Another figure appears to be seated on the donkey, which presumably may have been originally a bit further forward along the path.   

As was Claude's frequent custom (again, see Baldinucci, Notizie, 1847 ed., vol. V, p.93), the drawing is noted with the patron for whom the painting was made; in the present case, the drawing is inscribed on the back per m^r Daby de Grenoble/ Claudio fecit in V.R.  This is likely to be a certain M. Dauby, who was recorded as a collector of paintings and objects; given Claude's better known patrons at the time, including Pope Urban VIII, he must have been a man of considerable taste and means. The painting next appeared in an anonymous Paris sale in 1787 (see Provenance below) where it was described as a view of a sunset, together with a pendant representing a landscape with dancing figures.  Roethlisberger examines this question of a pendant to the present painting in some detail (see op. cit., p. 171), concluding in the end that this other picture was likely Claudian, but not by the master himself.  As the present painting is on an "Imperial" canvas (tela d'imperatore, that is about 134 centimeters across) a standard size in use in Rome in the 17^th century, matching it with another, perhaps indifferent landscape, would not have been difficult.  At any rate, the two remained together until they were seen together by John Smith in the collection of George Townely, after which point the other picture disappears.