'Bonnie ran the burnie down,
Wandering and winding;
Sweetly sang the birds aboon,
Care never minding.
'But now the burn comes down apace,
Roaring and reaming,
And for the wee birdies' sang
Wild howlets screaming.'
Imagine these two verses painted, and the painter, from a lack of comprehension, introducing the 'wild howlets screaming' beside the burnie, 'wandering and winding,' and the 'wee birdies' foolishly and inconsequently singing with their feeble song drowned in the rush of the burn (no longer a burnie), 'roaring and reaming,' when the 'spate' is spreading desolation on every side. Don't you see how the picture would be spoilt, and the story of complete contrast left untold? I have taken advisedly an extreme and, therefore an unlikely case of halting imagination. But in imaginative landscape every 'white flower with its purple stain,' every crushed butterfly, is made to play its part in the whole, and at the same time due proportion is never lost sight of, and the less is always kept subordinate to the greater.
I have already had occasion to mention examples of Nicolas Poussin in the National Gallery and in Dulwich Gallery.
Claude Gelée, better known as Claude Lorraine, was a native of Lorraine, and was born at Chateau de Chamagne in the Vosges, in 1600. His parents were in humble life, and apprenticed Claude to a baker and pastry-cook. According to some biographers the cooks of Lorraine were in such request that they occasionally repaired to Rome with their apprentices in their train to serve the successor of St Peter, and Claude was thus carried, in the way of trade, to the city which might well have been the goal of his ambition. According to other writers of art histories, Claude abandoned the kneading-trough and the oven; and it was as a runaway apprentice that by some occult means he reached Rome. And when he had arrived he entered into the service of a landscape painter of good repute, to whom he was colour-boy as well as cook. The last is the account, so far, which Claude gave of himself to a friend, and it is hardly likely either that he misrepresented his history, or that his friend invented such details, though lately French authorities have questioned the authenticity of the narrative. Claude remained for nearly the entire remainder of a long life in Rome. He only once re-visited France, while he was yet a young man, under thirty years of age, in 1625 or 1627. He is supposed to have painted his earliest pictures and executed his etchings about this time, 1630 and to have painted his best pictures fifteen years later, when he was in the maturity of his life and powers. He was counted successful during his life time, as a landscape painter, but did not amass a larger fortune than about two thousand pounds. [33] He was a slow and careful painter (working a fortnight at a picture with little apparent progress); his painstaking work, and his custom of keeping a book, in which he verified his pictures, are about the most that I can tell you of the habits of one of the foreign painters, who has been most fully represented in England, and was long in the highest favour with English lovers of art. Claude Lorraine died at Rome in the eighty-third year of his age, in 1682.
Claude Lorraine's name has become a very vexed name with art critics. There was a time when he had an unsurpassed reputation as a landscape painter. The possession of a Claude was enough to confer art glory on a country-house, and possibly for this reason England, in public and private collections, has more 'Claudes' than are held by any other country. But Claude's admirers, among whom Sir George Beaumont, the great art critic of his generation, took the lead, have had their day, and, if they have not by any means passed away, are on the wane.
The wrathful indignation of the English landscape painter, Turner, at the praise which was so glibly lavished on Claude—an indignation that caused Turner to bequeath two of his own landscape paintings to the trustees of the National Gallery, on the caustic condition that they should always be placed between the two celebrated 'Claudes,' known as 'The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' and 'The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba'—helped to shake the English art world's faith in its former idol. Mr Ruskin's adoption and proclamation of Turner's opinion shook the old faith still further. This reversal of a verdict with regard to Claude is peculiar; it is by no means uncommon for the decision of contemporaries to be set aside, and we shall hear of an instance presently, in the case of the painter Le Brun. In fact, it is often ominous with regard to a man's future fame, when he is 'cried up to the skies' in his own day. The probability may be that his easy success has been won by something superficial and fleeting. But Claude's great popularity has been in another generation, and with another nation. English taste may have been in fault; or another explanation seems preferable—that Claude's sense of beauty was great, with all its faults of expression, and he gave such glimpses of a beautiful world as the gazers on his pictures were capable of receiving, which to them proved irresistible.
While Claude adopted an original style as a landscape painter, so far as his contemporaries were concerned, he was to such a degree self taught, and only partially taught, that it is said he never learnt to paint figures—those in his pictures were painted by other painters, and that Claude even painted animals badly.
Mr Ruskin has been hard on Claude, whether justly or unjustly, I cannot pretend to say.
The critic denies the painter not only a sense of truth in art, but all imagination as a landscape painter 'Of men of name,' Mr Ruskin writes, 'Perhaps Claude is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of expression.' Mr Ruskin condemns in the strongest terms 'the mourning and murky olive browns and verdigris greens, in which Claude, with the industry and intelligence of a Sevres china painter, drags the laborious bramble leaves over his childish foreground.' But Mr Ruskin himself acknowledges, with a reservation, Claude's charm in foliage, and pronounces more conditionally his power, when it was at its best, in skies—a region in which the greater, as well as the less, Poussin was declared to fail signally; 'a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of Claude,' Mr Ruskin writes, 'is indeed most perfect, and beyond praise, in all qualities of air; though even with him I often feel rather that there is a great deal of pleasant air between me and the firmament, than that the firmament itself is only air.'