French 1600-1682 Claude Lorrain Galleries In Rome, not until the mid-17th century were landscapes deemed fit for serious painting. Northern Europeans, such as the Germans Elsheimer and Brill, had made such views pre-eminent in some of their paintings (as well as Da Vinci in his private drawings or Baldassarre Peruzzi in his decorative frescoes of vedute); but not until Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino do we see landscape become the focus of a canvas by a major Italian artist. Even with the latter two, as with Lorrain, the stated themes of the paintings were mythic or religious. Landscape as a subject was distinctly unclassical and secular. The former quality was not consonant with Renaissance art, which boasted its rivalry with the work of the ancients. The second quality had less public patronage in Counter-Reformation Rome, which prized subjects worthy of "high painting," typically religious or mythic scenes. Pure landscape, like pure still-life or genre painting, reflected an aesthetic viewpoint regarded as lacking in moral seriousness. Rome, the theological and philosophical center of 17th century Italian art, was not quite ready for such a break with tradition. In this matter of the importance of landscape, Lorrain was prescient. Living in a pre-Romantic era, he did not depict those uninhabited panoramas that were to be esteemed in later centuries, such as with Salvatore Rosa. He painted a pastoral world of fields and valleys not distant from castles and towns. If the ocean horizon is represented, it is from the setting of a busy port. Perhaps to feed the public need for paintings with noble themes, his pictures include demigods, heroes and saints, even though his abundant drawings and sketchbooks prove that he was more interested in scenography. Lorrain was described as kind to his pupils and hard-working; keenly observant, but an unlettered man until his death. The painter Joachim von Sandrart is an authority for 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 professoni del disegno). John Constable described Claude Lorrain as "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw", and declared that in Claude??s landscape "all is lovely ?C all amiable ?C all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart"  Related Paintings of Claude Lorrain :. | The Trojan Women Set Fire to their Fleet | Acis and Galatea (mk17) | Seaport at Sunset (mk17) | Coast Scene with the Rape of Europa (mk25) | cattle farmer and the landscape |
Related Artists:
Master of The Castello Nativity
Florence ca 1450-ca 1475
Jan Van Vucht
Dutch , Rotterdam 1603-1637
Peter Nicolai Arbo
(June 18, 1831 - October 14, 1892) was a Norwegian painter, who specialized in painting motifs from Norwegian history and images from Norse mythology. He is above all noted for Åsgardsreien, a dramatic motif based on a Norwegian folk legend and Valkyrie, which depicts a female figure from Norse mythology. Peter Nicolai Arbo grew up at Gulskogen Manor in Gulskogen, a borough in Drammen, Norway. He was the son of headmaster Christian Fredrik Arbo (1791-1868) and his wife Marie Christiane von Rosen. His brother Carl Oscar Eugen Arbo was a military medical doctor and a pioneer in Norwegian anthropologic studies. Arbo's childhood home, Gulskogen, was built in 1804 as a summer residence for his older cousin, lumber dealer and industrialist Peter Nicolai Arbo.Arbo started his art education with a year at the Art School operated by Frederick Ferdinand Helsted (1809-1875) in Copenhagen 1851-1852. After this, he studied at the art academy in Dusseldorf. From 1853 to 1855 he studied under of Karl Ferdinand Sohn, professor of The Dusseldorf School of Art, and from 1857-1858 under J. E. Henthen who was a battle and animal painter. At Dusseldorf he was for some time a private student of the history painter C. Mengelberg. He had contact with Adolph Tidemand and became a good friend of Hans Gude both of whom were professors at the art academy in Dusseldorf.