Botanist on Alp (No. 1)
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Panoramas are not what they used to be. Claude has been dead a long time And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular. Marx has ruined Nature, For the moment. For myself, I live by leaves, So that corridors of clouds, Corridors of cloudy thoughts, Seem pretty much one: I don't know what. But in Claude how near one was (In a world that was resting on pillars, That was seen through arches) To the central composition, The essential theme. What composition is there in all this: Stockholm slender in a slender light, An Adriatic riva rising, Statues and stars, Without a theme? The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard, The hotel is boarded and bare. Yet the panorama of despair Cannot be the specialty Of this ecstatic air.Claude has been dead...
French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, c.1604-1682.
Claude was acquainted not only with the facts, but also with the laws of nature; and the German painter Joachim von Sandrart relates that he used to explain, as they walked together through the fields, the causes of the different appearances of the same landscape at different hours of the day, from the reflections or refractions of light, or from the morning and evening dews or vapours, with all the precision of a natural philosopher. He elaborated his pictures with great care; and if any performance fell short of his ideal, he altered, erased and repainted it several times over.
His landscapes present to the spectator an endless variety; so many views of land and water, so many interesting objects, that, like an astonished traveller, the eye is obliged to pause and measure the extent of the prospect, and his distances of mountain and of sea, are so illusive, that the spectator feels, as it were, fatigued by gazing.
Claude Lorrain - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
