A landscape with Tivoli and the Temple of Vesta, hunters and an artist sketching in the foreground

Lot n° 54
63,2cmx70,8cm

This picture is distinguished as Claude's only hunting scene, yet as with many of the artist's works, the figures in the foreground are just a minor anecdote within a vast, idealized landscape. A cool morning light illuminates the view, emanating from the blue sky with wispy clouds that stretches above the haze-covered hills in the distance. This tranquil luminosity creates a striking counterbalance to the darker foreground, which is cast into shadow by the large screen of trees at left. For his inspiration, Claude drew upon hunting scenes by Paul Bril, who for nearly a half a century had been the leading landscape painter in Rome, prior to his death in 1626. Bril includes a remarkably similar group of figures in the lower left corner of his Landscape with a waterfall and the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli (Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover), painted in the last year of the artist's life. In fact, the overall arrangement of Bril's composition, with its stream of water rushing on the diagonal from left to right and ancient ruins at upper right has several parallels with Claude's landscape. Yet the French painter moves beyond his source material, drawing upon his thorough understanding of the effects of nature and light to create something that is altogether new. 

Claude's composition corresponds to that of the Liber Veritatis drawing no. 24 (see M. Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: the Paintings, London, 1961, I, p. 144, II, fig. 70). In the Liber drawing, however, the tree trunk over the river is absent and the figures are larger. Röthlisberger (loc. cit.) points out that such variations between the Liber drawings and the corresponding paintings are commonplace in Claude's oeuvre. An inscription on the Liberdrawing, dated by Röthlisberger to 1637/8, indicates that the painting was executed for a Neapolitan client, although the precise identity of this collector remains unknown. The scholar compares our painting to Claude's Landscape with the Judgment of Paris of 1633 in the Buccleuch collection, as well as the c. 1635 River landscape with Tiburtine Temple at Tivoli (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). Related drawings are in The British Museum, London, and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.