5. A SEAPORT AT SUNSET.
Claude Lorraine (French: 1600-1682). See 2.
An instance of false tone (cf. under Cuyp, No. 53). "Many even of the best pictures of Claude must be looked close into to be felt, and lose light every foot that we retire. The smallest of the three Seaports in the National Gallery is valuable and right in tone when we are close to it, but ten yards off it is all brick-dust, offensively and evidently false in its whole hue." Contrast "the perfect and unchanging influence of Turner's picture at any distance. We approach only to follow the sunshine into every cranny of the leafage, and retire only to feel it diffused over the scene, the whole picture glowing like a sun or star at whatever distance we stand, and lighting the air between us and it" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. i. § 20).
6. DAVID AT THE CAVE OF ADULLAM.[44]
Claude Lorraine (French: 1600-1682). See 2.
David, in front of the cave, "longed and said, 'Oh that one would give me to drink of the water of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!' And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines (seen in the valley), and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David" (2 Samuel xxiii. 15, 16). With regard to the landscape, the picture is a good instance at once of Claude's strength and weakness. Thus "the central group of trees is a very noble piece of painting" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. ii. § 8). On the other hand the rocks, both in the left corner and in the right, are highly absurd. "The Claudesque landscape is not, as so commonly supposed, an idealised abstract of the nature about Rome. It is an ultimate condition of the Florentine conventional landscape, more or less softened by reference to nature" (ibid., vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 27). So, too, "the brown foreground and rocks are as false as colour can be: first, because there never was such a brown sunlight, for even the sand and cinders (volcanic tufa) about Naples, granting that he had studied from these ugliest of all formations, are, where they are fresh fractured, golden and lustrous in full light, compared to these ideals of crags, and become, like all other rocks, quiet and gray when weathered; and secondly, because no rock that ever nature stained is without its countless breaking tints of varied vegetation" (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 16).
7, 37. GROUPS OF HEADS.
After Correggio. See under 10.
Copies by Annibale Carracci from Correggio's compositions in the church of S. Giovanni at Parma (Layard's edition of Kugler's Italian School of Painting, ii. 631). These pictures have had an eventful history, and been connected with the fortunes of many sovereigns. They came to the National Gallery from Mr. Angerstein, who bought them from the Orleans collection. They had formerly been in the possession of Queen Christina, having been carried off to Sweden as part of the plunder of Prague when that city was captured by the Swedes in 1648. The pictures collected there by the Emperor Rudolph II. were removed to Stockholm.