Claude Lorrain

Watermark: laid down.
Marcel Roethlisberger considered the present sheet “unmistakably inspired by Polidoro's landscape with the Magdalen” in S. Silvestro al Quirinale, Rome. Claude altered Polidoro's composition by moving the left hand section to the middle distance and enlarging the right foreground. Roethlisberger dates the drawing to the middle 1650s, because of certain similarities to a Liber Veritatis composition of that date (LV 152; British Museum, London). Claude also produced a drawing after the pendant fresco by Polidoro devoted to St. Catherine (Roethlisberger 762).
The drawing shares a mount with III, 79, a view of the Tiber with the Temple of Vesta, now considered by an artist in the circle of Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi. On the verso of the mount is Richardson's shelfmark along with a pasted patch containing an old inscription “Claudio Lorenese,” presumably trimmed from the sheet before it was mounted.