Circle of Claude Lorrain

Although this Italianate landscape has been associated with Claude Lorrain and his name is inscribed several times on the back of the mount, it is executed in a manner that had become common in Rome by the middle of the seventeenth century, especially among French and Northern artists. Executed entirely in brush and wash, without a preliminary outline in chalk, this sheet exhibits a loosely structured approach to space. Dark trees along a riverbank in the foreground frame a view to a complex of buildings, with no less than three round towers, on the opposite bank.