Neal Auction Winter Estates January 2015

30 119. After Claude Gellée “Claude Lorrain” (French, working in Italy, c. 1604/5-1682) , “A Courtly Couple Making Music in a Pastoral Landscape with Ruins”, late 17th c., oil on canvas, unsigned, inscribed en verso of stretcher “Richard Wilson, R.A.”, artist/title plaque affixed to frame inscribed “Bernardo Cavallino (1616-1656)/The Town of Aversa”, 27 1/2 in. x 39 7/8 in., framed. $5000/7000 Note: Although this radiantly attractive and authentically 17th-century painting bears conflicting modern attributions to Wilson and Cavallino, it is actually based instead on an earlier and even greater figure, the magisterial Claude Lorrain—who, together with Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), was one of the most important European artists of his century. It is a highly competent conflation of several of Claude’s famous etchings, with extensive reference also to his very frequent and often world-renowned paintings (that artist is represented today by perhaps 50 compositions among prints, around 300 paintings, and some 1300 drawings). Its general shape, character, and silhouette are based on Claude’s Herd Returning in Stormy Weather, known in three successive states, of 1650-1651 [Russell 1982, Etching 47]. From that print comes the middle ground as well as the far horizon of this painting, with its long view over the Roman Campagna—probably the Tiber valley—culminating in the same two distant mountains and a closer hill town; even the same small trees break out against the sky on the right edge of that print. The prominent ruins on the left, however, are actually adapted very precisely from the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum, exactly as they appear in Claude’s etching of the Campo Vaccino [five states, 1636-1637, Russell 1982, Etching 26]: those tall columns, again of the Ionic order, are borrowed so precisely from Claude’s earlier print that not only the delicate diagonal tree again accompanies them, but even the same more slender distant tree once more appears between their first and second columns. The more individual elements which contribute so much to the charm of this beautiful painting, though, are the central weir (taken from several of Claude’s paintings, such as The Rest on the Flight of the early 1640s [Russell 1982, Painting 33], in Cleveland), and especially the captivating pair of a standing male piper and a female trumpeter, seated and reading from sheet-music. These arrestingly focal figures do have approximate precedents at the same scale and positions in many of Claude’s works, including the Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape [Russell 1982, Etching 48, five states, c. 1652], but their conjoined music-making, in this painting, gives them a special poignancy. This fine picture clearly post-dates Claude’s works of the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s upon which it draws; it appears to have been painted by an emulator of his style during the later 17th century. Reference: H. Diane Russell, Claude Lorrain, Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, 1982. 119