drawing;
sketch-book
- Museum number
- 1957,1214.132
- Description
-
Landscape with Apollo and the Muses, record of a painting in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (NG 2240), from the Liber Veritatis; a group of figures, including Apollo and the Nine Muses, beneath trees on the further bank of a river which crosses the foreground, temple ruins behind, swans and deer near the foreground, a river god reclining at r. 1652
Pen and brown ink and brown wash
- Production date
- 1652
- Dimensions
-
Height: 196 millimetres
-
Width: 256 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- See 1957,1214.6 for information on the Liber Veritatis.
Kitson, Liber Veritatis:
Painting
Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. Canvas, 186 x 290 cm; signed and dated ‘CLAVDIO ROMA 1652’. This is Claude’s largest surviving painting. The drawing corresponds closely in the details (though some of the figures and animals are hard to make out) but is much compressed at the right, where hardly any space is left for the view of the distance between the main clumps of trees. A related composition drawing in the Louvre is described by Röthlisberger (RD, 717) as after the painting, but there seems to be no reason why it should not be a preparatory study for it; this is suggested by its more compact design, less monumental forms and lack of figures and animals.
Engravings,
Earlom, 126; Caracciolo, 126.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1977 BM, Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis
1978/9 Oct-Jan, Louvre, 'Claude Lorrain', no. 73
- Acquisition date
- 1957
- Acquisition notes
- Accepted by H M Government in lieu of tax on the estate of the 9th Duke of Devonshire.
See M. Kitson's 'Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis', pp. 28-9, for a full account of the provenance of the sketch-book.
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1957,1214.132
