Invention and Sentiment in the Landscape Paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin

Abstract

This dissertation examines the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). These artists, successful and admired during and long after their lifetimes, spent most of their careers in Rome where they painted for local patrons and for clients across Europe including popes, kings, cardinals, and princes. Claude and Poussin knew each other for decades, went on sketching trips together, and shared some patrons in common. While these artists appear together in previous scholarship, this dissertation is the first in-depth comparative study of them as innovators in the genre of landscape. This analysis affords a new understanding of their artistic intentions and contributions.I compare the circumstances around the creation of Poussin’s and Claude’s paintings—their artistic training, their sources, their patrons, their processes—and connect these to the operation of poetic conceits and sentiment in their paintings. In considering how Poussin and Claude painted for their most consequential patrons, I demonstrate that these artists deliberately crafted their paintings to achieve specific rhetorical and emotional effects. While elucidating Claude’s and Poussin’s significant differences, I also demonstrate areas of convergence between them, and I propose points of mutual influence, especially around inflection points in their oeuvres. I show the relevance of a variety of ancient and early modern sources for Poussin and Claude, including the pastoral poetry of Virgil and Ovid and of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers Torquato Tasso, Giambattista Marino, and Jacopo Sannazaro, which had laid the foundation for the expression of sentiment in landscape settings. Tasso and Marino elevated the use of poetic conceits, which Poussin made central in his own work, and which I establish were also important for Claude.