Claude le Lorrain, Claude Gellée, known as (1600-82). French painter. Claude was so popular and well established in Rome by 1637, with commissions from the Pope, cardinals, and the king of Spain, that he had to keep meticulous visual records of his work to defeat forgers. His evocative classical and biblical landscapes, often with the same titles as those of his scholarly friend Poussin, are very different in interpretation. In subjects derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses or the Aeneid and Georgics of Virgil, his landscape settings reflect the appropriate human sentiments in their weather conditions, times of day, poetic light effects, and lyrical moods. His work and that of his contemporary Gaspar Dughet (1615-75) were particularly influential on the development of landscape gardening and the Picturesque movement in 18th-c. England.

[Patsy Campbell]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.