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Lot Essay
A study for Claude's only depiction of the subject, formerly in Viscount Allendale's collection and now in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, M. Roethlisberger, op. cit., LV. 191, fig. 310. The picture, dated the year after the drawing, shows the figures in an extensive landscape and with small changes. The chariot is advancing in the former while in the latter, the driver has stepped down and is holding the horses. The picture's composition is also recorded in the Liber Veritatis series in the British Museum in a drawing dated 1678, M. Roethlisberger, op. cit., 1968, no. 1108.
The figures in the drawing are of a larger scale than in the picture, which led Marcel Roethlisberger to suggest that it might have been drawn while Claude was painting the composition. Claude could have completed the landscape and executed this drawing in the process of inserting the figures. Finished drawings with large figures are rare in Claude's late period, as is pointed out by Roethlisberger, who cites drawings for Minerva and the Muses of 1676, op. cit., nos. 1121-3.
The picture was painted for Cardinal Spada, with its pendant Landscape with Christ appearing to the Magdalen, now at Frankfurt.
The figures in the drawing are of a larger scale than in the picture, which led Marcel Roethlisberger to suggest that it might have been drawn while Claude was painting the composition. Claude could have completed the landscape and executed this drawing in the process of inserting the figures. Finished drawings with large figures are rare in Claude's late period, as is pointed out by Roethlisberger, who cites drawings for Minerva and the Muses of 1676, op. cit., nos. 1121-3.
The picture was painted for Cardinal Spada, with its pendant Landscape with Christ appearing to the Magdalen, now at Frankfurt.