Landscape with Ruins, Pastoral Figures, and Trees

c. 1650

Claude Lorrain

Artist, French, 1604/1605 - 1682

This horizontal landscape showing ruins in a countryside is drawn on dark parchment-brown paper. The view is framed to the left by a tall leafy tree that reaches off the top edge of the paper and to the right by ruins made up of two columns beneath an entablature. A group of four people sit together in the middle distance at the lower center of the composition while eight animals, possibly goats, graze and rest nearby. The animals, people, ruins, and tree to the left are drawn with brown ink. More trees and buildings in the distance at the center is drawn lightly with graphite, giving it a hazy look.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    pen and brown ink with graphite and brown wash over black chalk, heightened with white chalk, on apricot-prepared paper

  • Credit Line

    Syma Busiel Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 20.2 x 26.6 cm (7 15/16 x 10 1/2 in.)

  • Accession

    1976.8.1

  • Catalogue Raisonné

    Roethlisberger 1968, undescribed

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

J. Barnard (Lugt 1419, 1420); English private collection (sale, Christie's, London, 5 July 1975, lot 68); Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1978

  • Master Drawings from the Collection of the National Gallery of Art and Promised Gifts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1978, p. 68.

1982

  • Claude Lorrain, 1600-1682. National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Galeries nationales du Grand Palais. Washington, 1982, 245, no. 41.

1989

  • Italian Etchers of the Renaissance & Baroque, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Cleveland Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,1989, no. 82, repro.

2007

  • Claude Lorrain - The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2007, (not in cat.; shown only in Washington).

2009

  • Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 64-65, 278, 2009, no. 23 (color).

Bibliography

1968

  • Roethlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain: The Drawings. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

1970

  • Kitson, Michael. Review of Marcel Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings. Master Drawings 8, no. 4 (Winter, 1970): 409, pl. 43.

1975

  • Christie's, Lnd: 7/5/1975, 68.

1982

  • Russell 1982, 41.

1984

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 672, no. 1073, color repro.

Inscriptions

in later hand, lower center on mount in brown ink: Claude.; initialed by John Barnard in brown ink at lower right: J.B.; verso, in J. Barnard's hand at upper right in brown ink: J.B. No. 774. /10 1/2 by 8; inscribed in another hand in brown ink at lower left: g_gS and in pen and brown ink at lower right: AW; numbered in graphite at lower right: T46 (or T216).

Wikidata ID

Q64540122

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