Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain (1600-1682)

Professor Marcel Roethlisberger dated this drawing to the late 1630s and added that it was executed in the artist's studio from studies sketched at Tivoli. He noted that 'by contrast with the descriptive nature of the rendering of the site by other artists, Claude limits the details and the identifiable topography to a minimum. A dwarfed figure which can barely be made out below the bridge and the smallest glimpse of the sky make the scale appear all the bigger. Here and in some other drawings, Claude creates a daring example of the towering view from below', op. cit., p. 96. The same originality of composition will be found more than a century later in Fragonard's views of Tivoli.
Drawings of woods and the Tiber valley of the late 1630s with a similar broad use of wash are in the British Museum, M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain, The Drawings, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968, nos. 151, 177 and 278.
Claude used the same rock formation in a picture of 1658, Landscape with David and the three Heroes, in the National Gallery, London, M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain, The Paintings, London, 1961, no. 145, fig. 240.