Sunrise

Claude’s poetic landscape was inspired by the countryside around Rome, known as the Campagna. Although the foreground and middle-ground tones of this painting have darkened, the horizon preserves Claude’s famed luminosity. In a notebook recording executed works, known as his Liber Veritatis, Claude recorded that this painting was executed in Rome for an unnamed client in Lyons, France. It later belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds, head of London’s Royal Academy and an advocate for this kind of Arcadian vision, depicting a utopian world based on ancient poetry.