Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain
Study of two mules in a landscape
Estimate
10,000 - 15,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain
(Chamagne 1600 - 1682 Rome)
Study of two mules in a landscape
Black chalk and brown wash
124 by 184 mm
From an album belonging to the Odescalchi family, Rome, listed in the 1713 inventory of the family;
sale, London, Sotheby's, 20 November 1957, lot 67 (the whole album; bought by Hans Calmann and subsequently dismembered)
M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1968, vol. I, pp. 58, 138, no. 211, reproduced vol. II, fig. 211
This drawing was sheet 31 in what Marcel Roethlisberger has called the 'Animal Album', a late 18th or early 19th-century binding containing 64 sheets of studies by Claude pasted to its pages. The album was one of three containing drawings by Claude that were in the posession of the Odescalchi family in Rome, and may well have been made up by or for Livio Odescalchi from the stock of drawings which Claude bequeathed to his nephews.1 The 'Animal Album' was dismembered and dispersed by Hans Calmann, following the 1957 sale.
Apart from a few drawings of trees and plants at the end of the album, which may date from later in Claude's career, the great majority of the studies were of animals, and Roethisberger has dated these drawings to the 1630s and '40s, the period when Claude made most of his nature drawings. Most of the drawings in the 'Animal Album' depict the cattle that recur throughout the artist's paintings; just three are of mules. Although only two of the studies in the 'Animal Album' can be directly connected with animals in Claude's paintings, the album bears witness to how closely the artist studied and observed the creatures that play such an important role in his characteristic Arcadian compositions.
When Roethlisberger saw this drawing in 1957 it had another drawing with an architectural detail stuck to the back, but the reverse of the sheet is not currently visible so it is not possible to establish if that second study is still there.
1.J.J.L. Whiteley, Claude Lorrain, Drawings from the Collections of the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum, exh. cat., Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, and London, British Museum, 1998, p. 15
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