artfirstprimo at the Ashmolean

On 16th December I visited the Claude Gellee 1604/5?-1682 (called Claude Lorrain) exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.  It was quite refreshing to have been informed by some of the invigilators in the rooms that this exhibition has no proscribed route.  Indeed the Claude exhibition is simply divided into three rooms: drawings, paintings, and etchings. For me this was infinitely preferable as  am somewhat lothed to follow the convyer-belt-like fashion of visiting exhibitions, which usually results in me starting exhibitions at the end.

In the room of Claude's drawings in this Ashmolean exhibition are some fascinating drawings on the wall devoted to compositions.  Claude's compositions included drawings made not for paintings, but made from paintings as works of art in their own right.  Among the compositional drawings we see a drawing made after Claude's Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.  The drawing in pen & ink & brown wash is from the Staatliche museum, Berlin, but painting it's taken from is in the National Gallery, London.  The drawing of Seaport with Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, with its long dark shadows retains all the drama of its painted counterpart.  But in some ways Claude's Seaport composition even manages to surpass even his own painting of the scene in its apparent immediacy.

Another notable drawing on this wall is the Adoration of the Golden Calf, it's the largest of four scenes dedicated to this popular subject. The dancing maidens in the Adoration of the Golden Calf clearly have a deliberate antique quality to them and reminds one of Greek caryatids, such as on sees on the Erectheon in Athens. Ironically the Golden Calf is almost imperceptible, being as it were dwarfed by the ornate neoclassical composite column upon which it stands.  Other than his religious scenes the composition are of Arcadian rustic idylls; i.e. peasants and livestock in the landscape and nobility on horseback surveying their land and ultimately looking down on the "happy peasants".  Such Virgilian rustic idylls reminds one of similar scenes found in the work of the Dutch painter from Dordrecht, Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691).

In the room of paintings we are confronted with 12 large-scale pictures that with classical scenes imported into them, and one small landscape.  In Landscape with the Judgement of Paris, Claude follows the Renaissance tradition of interest in this subject, but Claude also hints at a more prosaic outcome to the famous story with a barely visible couple of rutting goats in the left foreground.  On the opposite wall are Claude's late mythological and historical landscapes paintings.  These large-scale painted works by Claude Lorrain are visibly colder in colour when compared to the opposite wall.  They also in some cases have peculiarly and impossibly elongated figures that apparently indicative of his late style, but reminds this reviewer of late mannerist painting or even the strange forms one finds in the works of Botticelli.

Unlike the ever-popular Leonardo exhibition in London the Claude exhibition is not busy, which means one can observe the, tiny and intricate, etchings that Claude produced at close quarters.  There is even a cabinet in this room of exquisite engravings that shows one the materials and techniques needed to achieve an engraving.

The Claude exhibition at the Ashmolean, Oxford is refreshing, very well curated and well worth seeing. Claude is certainly an artist that warrants re-discovering beyond his occasional chocolate box image.