Word: lorrainers
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...19th century. Corot painted 3,000 pictures, the saying went, of which 10,000 have been sold in America. His late work in particular--those silvery, atmospheric nymph-and-willow scenes like Memory of Mortefontaine, 1864, elegiac in tone and populated by rustic figures who descended from Claude Lorrain's shepherdesses--fetched record prices at a time when Impressionism still seemed rather daring to most Americans, and painting posthumous versions of them became quite an industry...
Cole had no formal training. He learned about landscape painting from theoretical tracts and the early-19th century equivalent of how-to manuals, backed up by a great deal of attentive looking. He couldn't draw the human figure -- but then neither could his hero, Claude Lorrain. His efforts in that direction, as in a huge painting of Prometheus chained to his rock with the eagle flying in for lunch, were risible. Wisely, he kept his Indians and woodsmen and saints in the far distance...
...good luck to be taken on as a student by Thomas Cole, whose slightly stilted allegorical landscapes had made him the most famous American artist of the 1840s. Like Cole, he painted scenes along the Hudson River and in the Catskills, in a manner much indebted to Claude Lorrain: peaceful arcadian vistas with the silver glint of lakes under evening skies. Church's valediction to his dead master, To the Memory of Cole, 1848, with its rose-wreathed cross on a mountainside between two emblems -- the tree stump (death) and the evergreens (posthumous fame) -- carries the Claudean stereotype into America...
Arcadia was the humanist's Club Med. In it, nothing happens. Shepherds and nymphs, young soldiers and scholars, madonnas, saints and animals loll about in a state of pure being, with no future tense. Arcadia has ruins, sometimes quite grand ones -- as in Claude Lorrain's classical revisions of the pastoral landscape, here represented by the Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing, 1641 -- but Roman architecture does not include a stern call to Roman virtue and gravity. Arcadia's weather is always equable, and its views intimate and mellow. Above all, its location is not too far out of town...
...wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West...