Claude Lorrain

Watermark: Hand. Watermark, beta radiograph. Hand or glove. 109803wm_III80_81_Claude_WM_beta.jpg
The present sheet is related to Claude's Pastoral Landscape, commissioned for an unidentified patron in Avignon in 1646 (see also III, 80). The painting, now in the Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, depicts the same figural group set in a broader landscape with the addition of a shepherd and two washerwomen at left. The woman balancing a basket of wash on her head and she leads a dog and lifts her skirts to ford the stream corresponds exactly in pose to the same figure in the painting. The herdsman, who uses a branch to hurry along his goats and cattle, has a larger herd in the painting and raises his left arm in exclamation at the beasts. A circular format drawing in the Wildenstein collection reproduces the painted composition, although it was probably based on Claude's record of the painting in the Liber Veritatis (British Museum, London, no. 103). Roethlisberger suggests it might have been done in preparation for a painting on copper. The present composition follows the circular Wildenstein sheet, but is more highly finished. On an intimate scale, this drawing allows for a greater focus on the laborers in the foreground, unlike the vast square canvas with its distant vantage which turns the figures into a motif in the larger landscape.