Landscape composition with a small bridge in the foreground

Claude

Summary

A reproduction produced by the Vasari Society of a drawing by Claude. The drawing is mainly very dark in tone, with occasional patches of light. It shows a landscape surrounded by leafy trees. There is a bridge in the foreground, and the shapes of some buildings can be made out just right of centre. Five birds are flying in a line in the bright patch of sky. The rest of the drawing's detail is indistinct in this reproduction. Text from the accompanying booklet produced by the Vasari Society: "23. CLAUDE (b. 1600; d. 1682) LANDSCAPE COMPOSITION WITH A SMALL BRIDGE IN THE FOREGROUND Collection of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G., Chatsworth. Pen and bistre and bistre wash. 14.5 x 21.9 cm. (5 11/16 x 8 5/8 in.). A river valley in the distance with a walled town on the plain and another on a hill, and two figures amid the trees, left, are brought out with merciless clarity in Earlom's mezzotint (sequel to the Liber Veritatis, vol. iii. 1819, No. 82). The composition is similar in character to a drawing once in the collection of Edmund Turnor (Earlom, ii. 65), and to another in the collection of Mr. Walter Gay, from the Esdaile and Lawrence collections (reproduced, Société de Reproduction des dessins de Maîtres, iii, 1911), which is probably the original of G. Lewis's plate in Ottley's Italian School of Design, 1823. A weaker version (possibly a copy) of the latter is in the Dyce collection, South Kensington (571). A. M. H. [Mrs. Mark Pattison, Claude Lorrain, Paris, 1884, p. 282, No. 20.]"