The Pope, the Spanish King, cardinals and Roman nobles
showered him
with commissions. Louis XIV of France, the first notable collector of his
work, greatly admired the painter Claude Gellee, who took the name of his
birthplace,
Lorrain,
as his surname. When he was twelve or thirteen, he moved to Rome, where he
spent the rest of his life, with the exception of two years in France. In
Italy-he was caught up in the enthusiasm for antiquity and the Middle
Ages.
Claude Lorrain loved painting fantastic
landscapes filled with temples, palaces, ruins and magnificent trees of
his own invention. He not only worked over his compositions, he staged the
scenes. His handling of light was what made him unique; indeed,
Lorrain is
famous for being the first painter to exploit overtly the manifold
possibilities offered by the play of light and atmospheric effects. His
paintings of seaport scenes with the sun reflecting off the surface of the
water have earned him his reputation as a master of landscape painting.
The Romantic philosopher Carl Gustav Carus raved about
Lorrain's "mild wafting of southern breezes" with all their
"clarity inspiring sensibility". Johann Wolfgang von Goethe owned
twenty-seven
Lorrain etchings. In his Italian Journey, Goethe feels
at a loss for words to express his debt to
Lorrain:
"There are no words to describe the clear haze hovering over the coasts
when we used to go towards Palermo on the most lovely afternoons; the
purity of contour, the softness of the whole, the subtle gradation of
tones, the harmony of sky, sea and land. He who has seen it possesses it
for a lifetime. Now I begin to appreciate
Claude Lorrain."
Lorrain had always focused on landscape. However, he used his shady
foregrounds as settings for mythological and biblical scenes, such as
Seaport with the
Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. There are no literary
references to the event. The Old Testament merely describes the legendary
queen's stay in Jerusalem, where she visited King Solomon in the tenth
century ВС to ascertain whether his wisdom was all it was reputed to be.
The subject-matter of the painting, which was commissioned by a nephew of Pope Innocent X in
1648, the last year of the Thirty Years' War, is purely a product of the
artist's own poetic imagination. Yet,
Lorrain was not the only artist
enthralled by the Queen of Sheba. In his play entitled
The Sibyl of the Orient or The
Great Queen of Sheba, the
Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca writes: "Where the sun's first
cradle stands, where the light begins the travail of his daily journey,
there lies a fertile, rich land like a thousand gardens of narcissi. This
place, which glows so delightfully in the young beams of day, is ruled by
the Queen of Sheba."
