Explore Thomas Cole

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• 1.Gellée, The Village Fête
• 2.Allston, Italian Landscape

Claude Gellée (Le Lorrain), The Village Fête (La Fête Villageoise), oil on canvas, 1639, 40 ½ x 53 1/5 in. The Louvre, Collection of Louis XIV, INV 4714. View in Scrapbook

The French landscapist Claude Gellée, commonly known as Claude Lorrain (1600-82), was another European master whose work Cole closely studied during his time in Europe. The Arcadian or Pastoral State demonstrates the influence of Claude's cultivated landscapes on Cole's work, with its light colors and soft brushwork. Like most ambitious landscape artists of his time, Cole was indebted to Claude's characteristic classical settings and distinctive compositional devices: balanced arrangements of trees and buildings framing a central landscape that recedes sinuously toward a light-suffused horizon. Claude's pictures provided much-imitated models for two categories of landscape painting: the beautiful and the pastoral. An American precedent for such graceful compositions is Washington Allston's Italian Landscape of 1814. Through an intermediary, Allston advised Cole particularly to seek out Claude's works for study while in Europe. In fact, when Cole was in Rome in 1832, he even worked in a painting room that was reportedly once occupied by Claude. By the 1840s, Cole actually came to be known as the "American Claude." ¹