Gellée

Born in Lorraine and later nicknamed after his native province, Claude Gellée left for Italy in his early youth. His biographers’ opinions differ as to the reasons of his departure. He appears to have lived in Rome and Naples and worked for Goffredo Wals and Agostino Tassi. After a brief return to Lorraine in 1625-1627 when he worked for Claude Deruet, he returned to Rome where he settled permanently.  There he befriended the pittori fiaminghi, those Dutch and Flemish artists living in Rome who founded the Schilders-Bent (“Band of painters”) whose members Herman van Swanevelt, Cornelis Poelenburch and Bartholomeus Breenbergh were famous for their habit of drawing outdoors, sur le motif.  The painter and theorist Joachim Sandrart, Claude’s principal biographer, describes how the artist first “tried by every means to penetrate nature, lying in the fields before the break of day and until night in order to learn to represent very exactly the red morning-sky, sunrise and sunset and the evening hours.” This poetic but tedious habit was later replaced by that of painting directly en plein air, which Claude Lorrain had presumably learnt from Pieter van Laer and Joachim Sandrart.

The present drawing was once part of the so-called “Wildenstein album” which was published several times by Marcel Roethlisberger in whose opinion “almost every sheet is one of the finest of its kind, or a specimen without peer”¹. It is a preparatory study for the figure of Moses in the painting Moses before the Burning Bush, today in the collection of Duke of Sutherland at Bridgewater House². As was his usual practice, Claude made a ricordo of the painting in his Liber Veritatis (L.V. 161; British Museum, no. 1900.8.24.154) and inscribed the name of the patron: ‘ce tablaux faict pour / l’ill.^mo sig. monsigneur / de Bourlemont/ Claudio Gillee / fecit / Roma 1664’. First French diplomat in Rome who maintained diplomatic presence when ambassador was missing from Rome, Louis d’Anglure de Bourlemont (1618 – 1697) was also Colbert’s agent in the acquisition of works of art. Also born in Lorraine, Bourlemont commissioned or purchased at least five Claude’s paintings, including Moses and the Burning Bush, Cephalus and Procris (L.V. 163), Apollo and the Sybil (L.V. 164), Demosthenes on the Sea-shore (L.V. 171). He was one of the two patrons appointed in the artist’s will to receive his legacies. Other drawings connected with the painting are in the collection of Duke of Devonshire in Chatsworth (n° 872 and 938) and in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle (n° 13082).  A copy of L.V. 161 was made by Claude himself for the Jesuit priest Lazzaro Sorba, as well as a copy of Tobias and the Angel drawn in 1663. Both of them are in the Kupferstichkabinett in Staatliche Museen in Berlin (n° 1472 and 1473).

This lovely drawing focuses on the figure of Moses and it reminds that Claude was often – wrongly – assumed to consider figures as mere accessories – or even excuses for – landscape painting. John Ruskin cited the Bridgewater painting as a proof of Claude’s “incapacity of understanding the main point in anything he had to represent”. And yet this depiction of Moses – shown as a young³ shepherd running in the fields, hopping over rocks and bushes under the wide sky scattered with flying birds, with nothing that suggests yet the future patriarch that he will become – lacks neither refinement of interpretation nor poetry. Still inebriated by the nature, he suddenly sees the burning bush and hears his name called out, and struck by surprise, which is expressed by his twisted left hand and facial expression, he kneels on a rock. According to Marcel Roethlisberger, “the thirteen figure drawings [from the Wildenstein album], several of which relate to the major paintings for papal and princely families, are without parallel in number and quality”⁴.

Pastoral poetry with which Claude imbued his works did not escape his contemporaries but the artist only occasionally agreed to sell or offer his drawings. The figure of Moses in the present drawing is highly reminiscent to that in the painting, but the burning bush is barely visible on the left. The landscape is centred differently and there are framing lines in pen and ink made by Claude, which shows that he intended the drawing as an independent work of art, autonomous from the painting which he executed only a year later. Therefore, the figure is not a ricordo of the painted one but belongs to an earlier stage of the creation process in preparation for the painting and bears testimony to Claude’s drawn reflection of the figure of Moses shown at the moment of revelation.