After Claude Lorrain, end of the 19th century-beginning of the 20th century

After CLAUDIO DE LORENA (Lorraine, France, 1600- Rome, Papal States, 1686), late 19th century-early 20th century.
"Moses saved from the waters".
Oil on canvas.
Stretcher frame and frame with xylophages.
Measurements: 210 x 141 cm; 223 x 153 cm (frame).

Claude Lorrain's style had many followers over the centuries. The painting in tender is a copy of one of his great works, preserved in the Prado Museum, "Moses saved from the waters". It shows the moment when Moses is saved from the waters by the daughter of the Egyptian Pharaoh and her entourage. In the foreground, a shepherd sleeps unaware of the event taking place behind him. The Spanish art gallery states "Leaving aside his figures, Lorraine literally copied this composition in the landscape with the Rest in the Flight into Egypt (1645, The Cleveland Museum of Art; Roethlisberger 1961) and only partially in the Landscape with Shepherds (1641, Castle Howard, Howard collection; Roethlisberger 1961) where the same bridge, the river and some trees, taken directly from the Prado painting, appear".

The work was part of the formidable campaign of art acquisitions organized by the Count-Duke of Olivares in the forties of the seventeenth century to decorate the vast spaces of the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid, which included a very notable number of landscapes. At a minimum, a series of 24 "landscapes with anchorites" and 10 "Italianate landscapes" were commissioned, large-format works by different artists. "Only a part of these paintings have come down to us and are now mainly preserved in the Museo del Prado," says the gallery.

Lorrain was an important French landscape painter who worked in Italy. Born Claude Gellée, he took the art surname of his hometown Lorraine, in northeastern France. His first apprenticeship in painting probably took place in Naples, at the German landscape painter Godfrey Waals. In 1625, while in Rome, he came under the protection of Agostino Tassi (1578-1644), a landscape painter. After this period he traveled extensively in Italy, France and Germany, and returned to work in Lorraine. In 1627, he received the patronage of Cardinal Bentivoglio (1579-1644) and Pope Urban VIII (1568-1644). With these early works, Lorrain made a reputation as a talented landscape painter who fully understood all the effects of light and the laws of nature.