Description
This drawing represents a view of the famous Acqua Acetosa, a mineral spring that until the 19th century provided the favored drinking water of Romans who believed in its healing powers. Although topographically accurate, the sheet is not a plein-air study but a vision of an imagined Arcadian world carefully rendered by Gellée, one of the most original painters of the 17th century. The French-born artist spent his career painting and drawing the Roman Campagna and the Neopolitan coastline. Sublimely beautiful pen-and-ink and wash drawings such as the example here reveal the artist's highly poetic response to the natural world and his unparalleled sensitivity to light.
Provenance
Sir Joshua Reynolds(?); Sir Abraham Hume; by descent to Lord Alford; by descent to the Earls of Brownlow; [sale, Sotheby's, London, 14 July 1926, lot 43]; Mr. and Mrs. Edward Belden Greene, Cleveland.
Accession Number
1928.15.a
Medium
pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over graphite, framing lines in brown ink
Dimensions
Sheet: 26 x 40.5 cm (10 1/4 x 15 15/16 in.)
Classification
Drawing
Credit Line
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward B. Greene
Tags
Color: Orange Color: Gold
Background & Context
Background Story
This sheet represents the recto of Claude Lorrain's double-sided drawing "View of the Acqua Acetosa" (c. 1645). Executed in pen and brown ink with brush and brown wash over graphite, it shows Claude's spontaneous approach to recording the Roman landscape. The Acqua Acetosa was a site on the Tiber River north of Rome, famous for its iron-rich mineral springs that gave the water a distinctive sour taste (hence "acetosa," meaning sour). Claude visited this location repeatedly, producing studies that he would later incorporate into his finished paintings or keep as independent records of light, atmosphere, and topography. The drawing shows a panoramic view with rolling hills, scattered trees, and the characteristic soft light of the Roman Campagna. Claude's pen work is energetic yet controlled, creating a sense of immediacy that contrasts with the more deliberate execution of his studio works. This directness makes his landscape drawings essential to understanding his artistic process: they are the raw material from which his idealized, classical landscapes were synthesized.
Cultural Impact
Claude's habit of drawing directly from the Roman landscape established a practice of plein-air study that would become central to landscape art in the following centuries, particularly influencing the Barbizon School and Impressionists.
Why It Matters
This spontaneous landscape study shows Claude at his most natural and unguarded, capturing the particular quality of Italian light and topography with a freshness that his more finished paintings necessarily sacrifice to idealization.
