Claude

Calm, beautiful and serene . . . fleecy skies, resplendent valleys, campagnas rich with all the cheerful blush of fertilization' is how another great landscape painter, Turner, described the landscapes of the seventeenth-century artist Claude Lorrain. Claude has long been admired for his panoramic views and luminous effects of light, yet it is less often remarked that many of these landscapes represent incidents from literature - particularly the Bible and the classical poetry of Ovid and Virgil. Claude: The Poetic Landscape looks at Claude as a painter of stories, bringing together some twenty-eight paintings and over fifty drawings to examine how important the subjects of his pictures were to the artist, and how far they determined the form of his compositions. Most of the paintings and drawings discussed and illustrated here are from public and private collections in Britain, which are especially rich in his work. They include the celebrated pair of Altieri Claudes from Anglesey Abbey - The Father of Psyche sacrificing to Apollo and The Arrival of Aeneas before the City of Pallanteum; several works from Holkham Hall, including the beautiful Perseus and the Origin of Coral; Ascan