His skies are aerial and full of lustre, and every object harmoniously illumined. His distances and colouring are delicate, and his tints have a sweetness and variety till then unexampled. He frequently gave an uncommon tenderness to his finished trees by glazing. His figures, however, are very indifferent; but he was so conscious of his deficiency in this respect, that he usually engaged other artists to paint them for him, among whom were Courtois and Filippo Lauri. Indeed, he was wont to say that he sold his landscapes and gave away his figures. In order to avoid a repetition of the same subject, and also to detect the very numerous spurious copies of his works, he made tinted outline drawings (in six paper books prepared for this purpose) of all those pictures which were transmitted to different countries; and on the back of each drawing he wrote the name of the purchaser. These books he named Libri di verità. This valuable work (now belonging to the duke of Devonshire) has been engraved and published, and has always been highly esteemed by students of the art of landscape. Claude, who had suffered much from gout, died in Rome at the age of eighty-two, on the 21st (or perhaps the 23rd) of November 1682, leaving his wealth, which was considerable, between his only surviving relatives, a nephew and an adopted daughter (? niece).
Many choice specimens of his genius may be seen in the National Gallery and in the Louvre; the landscapes in the Altieri and Colonna palaces in Rome are also of especial celebrity. A list has been printed showing no less than 92 examples in the various public galleries of Europe. He himself regarded a landscape which he painted in the Villa Madama, being a cento of various views with great abundance and variety of leafage, and a composition of Esther and Ahasuerus, as his finest works; the former he refused to sell, although Clement IX. offered to cover its surface with gold pieces. He etched a series of twenty-eight landscapes, fine impressions of which are greatly prized. Full of amenity, and deeply sensitive to the graces of nature, Claude was long deemed the prince of landscape painters, and he must always be accounted a prime leader in that form of art, and in his day a great enlarger and refiner of its province.
Claude was a man of amiable and simple character, very kind to his pupils, a patient and unwearied worker; in his own sphere of study, his mind was stored (as we have seen) with observation and knowledge, but he continued an unlettered man till his death. Famous and highly patronized though he was in all his later years, he seems to have been very little known to his brother artists, with the single exception of Sandrart. This painter is the chief direct authority for the facts of Claude’s life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude’s immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professori del disegno).
See also Victor Cousin, Sur Claude Gelée (1853); M.F. Sweetser, Claude Lorrain (1878); Lady Dilke, Claude Lorrain (1884).
(W. M. R.)
CLAUDET, ANTOINE FRANÇOIS JEAN (1797-1867), French photographer, was born at Lyons on the 12th of August 1797. Having acquired a share in L.J.M. Daguerre’s invention, he was one of the first to practise daguerreotype portraiture in England, and he improved the sensitizing process by using chlorine in addition to iodine, thus gaining greater rapidity of action. In 1848 he produced the photographometer, an instrument designed to measure the intensity of photogenic rays; and in 1849 he brought out the focimeter, for securing a perfect focus in photographic portraiture. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, and in 1858 he produced the stereomonoscope, in reply to a challenge from Sir David Brewster. He died in London on the 27th of December 1867.
CLAUDIANUS, CLAUDIUS, Latin epic poet and panegyrist, flourished during the reign of Arcadius and Honorius. He was an Egyptian by birth, probably an Alexandrian, but it may be conjectured from his name and his mastery of Latin that he was of Roman extraction. His own authority has been assumed for the assertion that his first poetical compositions were in Greek, and that he had written nothing in Latin before A.D. 395; but this seems improbable, and the passage (Carm. Min. xli. 13) which is taken to prove it does not necessarily bear this meaning. In that year he appears to have come to Rome, and made his début as a Latin poet by a panegyric on the consulship of Olybrius and Probinus, the first brothers not belonging to the imperial family who had ever simultaneously filled the office of consul. This piece proved the precursor of the series of panegyrical poems which compose the bulk of his writings. In Birt’s edition a complete chronological list of Claudian’s poems is given, and also in J.B. Bury’s edition of Gibbon (iii. app. i. p. 485), where the dates given differ slightly from those in the present article.
In 396 appeared the encomium on the third consulship of the emperor Honorius, and the epic on the downfall of Rufinus, the unworthy minister of Arcadius at Constantinople. This revolution was principally effected by the contrivance of Stilicho, the great general and minister of Honorius. Claudian’s poem appears to have obtained his patronage, or rather perhaps that of his wife Serena, by whose interposition the poet was within a year or two enabled to contract a wealthy marriage in Africa (Epist. 2). Previously to this event he had produced (398) his panegyric on the fourth consulship of Honorius, his epithalamium on the marriage of Honorius to Stilicho’s daughter, Maria, and his poem on the Gildonic war, celebrating the repression of a revolt in Africa. To these succeeded his piece on the consulship of Manlius Theodorus (399), the unfinished or mutilated invective against the Byzantine prime minister Eutropius in the same year, the epics on Stilicho’s first consulship and on his repulse of Alaric (400 and 403), and the panegyric on the sixth consulship of Honorius (404). From this time all trace of Claudian is lost, and he is generally supposed to have perished with his patron Stilicho in 408. It may be conjectured that he must have died in 404, as he could hardly otherwise have omitted to celebrate the greatest of Stilicho’s achievements, the destruction of the barbarian host led by Radagaisus in the following year. On the other hand, he may have survived Stilicho, as in the dedication to the second book of his epic on the Rape of Proserpine (which Birt, however, assigns to 395-397), he speaks of his disuse of poetry in terms hardly reconcilable with the fertility which he displayed during his patron’s lifetime. From the manner in which Augustine alludes to him in his De civitate Dei, it may be inferred that he was no longer living at the date of the composition of that work, between 415 and 428.