Claude Lorrain was a French painter known for his golden-hued pastoral landscapes. Based in the Roman countryside, Claude focused his observations on changes in the sky and the tonalities of sunlight upon foliage. “He tried by every means to penetrate nature, lying in the fields before the break of day and until night in order to learn to represent very exactly the red morning sky, sunrise and sunset and the evening hours,” Claude’s biographer Joachim von Sandrart once wrote. Born Claude Gellée c. 1600 in Chamagne, France, he was orphaned by the age of 12. Travelling to Rome, where he was said to have worked as a pastry cook, Lorrain began his artistic studies under the landscape painters Agostino Tassi and Goffredo Wals. Little is known about the artist prior to 1629, though by 1636 his reputation was already established through the patronage of King Philip IV of Spain and Pope Urban VIII. Though he did portray Biblical, mythological, and literary subjects, much of the artist’s oeuvre was comprised of simple themes, such as dancing peasants or ships at sea. The artist died on November 23, 1682 in Rome, Italy. The idyllic subject matter found in the works of Claude and his contemporary Nicolas Poussin, inspired several important early 19th-century painters, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and John Constable. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery in London, among others.