Claude Lorrain is an artist who has managed to open a new page in the genre of idyllic landscape. With all the typicality of the applied compositional techniques typical of classicism landscape painting, the artist managed to breathe in new life into the old classicistic scheme, which led to the genre’s renewal in the 19th century.
Lorrain introduced not only pen and watercolor painting of landscapes from nature, the study of natural motifs, but also turned to the use of tonal color in painting, matching it with the natural palette. Lorrain used this technique in a rather original way. He went beyond the city walls of Rome, where he lived constantly from 1627, in the morning and in the evening and, observing tonal transitions in the surrounding nature, created the appropriate color scheme on his palette.
Already in the workshop he used the resulting scale when working on the next piece. Thanks to this technique, Lorrain managed to create pictures filled with amazing pictorial charm, in which, with a certain theatricality peculiar to the works of classicism, there is a living breath of nature and air.
The customers of Lorrain were mainly aristocrats, the Roman throne. Other famous works: “Landscape with a scene of rest on the way to Egypt.” 1661. Hermitage, St. Petersburg; “Abduction of Europe”. 1665. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin, Moscow.
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