Claude Gellée, named Lorrain after his birthplace in France, arrived in Rome as a teenager around 1617, perhaps to learn the trade of pastry cook. He trained as a landscape painter and spent most of his long working life in Rome, eventually finding great fame and winning the patronage of popes, cardinals and princes. Although landscape painting was already well established in the early seventeenth century, Claude elevated the genre to a new level of achievement, influencing artists across several centuries and to some extent helping to shape the way that we still frame and impose meaning on the natural world today.

This picture is the largest surviving painting by Claude. It was commissioned by Camillo Astalli, a young man who was catapulted into prominence in 1650 when Pope Innocent x appointed him as his Cardinal-Nephew and potential succes­sor. Astalli’s elevation was brief (in 1654 he was disgraced for allegedly revealing state secrets to Spain) but he did at least have the opportunity to commission the largest and most ambitious painting of Claude’s entire career.

The left half of the composition is dominated by a wooded hill, a fusion of Helicon and Parnassus, the mountains in Greek mythology that are associated with poetic inspiration. Apollo is shown playing his lyre and is surrounded by his nine muses. A number of toga-clad poets are depicted arriving or making the difficult ascent through the woods to be received by the figure of Fame who stands at the threshold of the temple at the summit of the hill. Below the temple, it is just possible to make out the winged horse Pegasus striking his hooves against a rock to release the sacred Hippocrene spring, the source of inspiration for poets.

The references to fame, immortality and creativity throughout the composition would have been designed to flatter Claude’s young patron who was fascinated by the world of classical antiquity. But it is the beautiful landscape that extends beyond the reclining river god in the right half of the picture that captures our attention. Claude’s landscapes were created in the studio but he used the drawings and sketches that he made on trips to the countryside around Rome as raw material. His final paintings are idealised evocations, suffused with a sense of longing for the classical world. However, standing in front of this work, it is easy to understand how his contemporaries were equally amazed by the convincing luminosity and freshness of his vision.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.