In s2e29, Platemark hosts Ann Shafer and Tru Ludwig talk about Claude Lorrain, the arbiter of landscape painting in the 17th century. He worked most of his life in Rome and elevated landscape as a subject up the hierarchy by including small figural groups and naming the compositions with mythological or biblical subjects.
Claude is known by various names that can be confusing. He was born Claude Gelée in the independent duchy of Lorraine, which is why the French call him Le Lorrain. The English, who collected his works assiduously and even know have the highest number of his works (by country), refer to him simple as Claude.
He created an amazing cache of ink and wash drawings of each of his painted compositions in a first catalogue raisonné of sorts. He dubbed this book the Liber Veritatis («the book of truth»). Claude told his biographer Filippo Baldinucci that he kept the record as a defense against others passing off their work as his. This bound group of drawings was collected and owned by the Dukes of Devonshire from the 1720s until 1957 when it was given to the British Museum (in lieu of estate taxes upon the death of Victor Christian William Cavendish, the 9th Duke of Devonshire).
While Claude died in 1682, his renown in England was enough to prompt the print publisher John Boydell to hire Richard Earlom to create prints after the drawings nearly one hundred years after the artist’s death. Two hundred etchings with mezzotint were created between 1774 and 1777 and were published in two volumes as Liber Veritatis. Or, A Collection of Two Hundred Prints, After the Original Designs of Claude le Lorrain, in the Collection of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, Executed by Richard Earlom, in the Manner and Taste of the Drawings.... Later, a third volume of an additional 100 prints was published in 1819.
Earlom used etching to mimic Claude’s ink lines and mezzotint for the wash areas. They were printed in brown ink to mimic iron gall ink. Hugely popular and influential in England, the books were popular with collectors and were used by artists as models for copying. The Liber Veritatis also inspired J.M.W. Turner to produce a similar project of 71 prints after Turner’s landscape compositions, which he called Liber Studiorum.
They may appear old fashioned to contemporary viewers, but rest assured, landscape was just getting its legs under it. Boring imagery? Maybe. But it is important for our story of the history of prints in the West.