Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape
Another goal achieved - visited the Ashmolean to see Lorrain's pastoral paintings - stumbled in there at ten to six, got them to unlock the gallery & ler me in even tho i had no ticket! SO I only had a chance to look round real quick and get an impression - they were all large imposing pictures, clearly designed to impress in stately homes, and all used identical palettes of pastel shades, deep greens and light cyans. although they didn't have a huge emotional impact, the scenes of mythical characters swamped by a placed eternal nature, with decaying classical architecture, evoked a sense of nostalgia and distance; it felt like being in the wood between the worlds in Lewis' Narnia books.I begged the attendant to let me do a quick sketch of one of the paintings; i copied the basic layout of the painting in about 60 seconds! I noted that human anatomy wasn't the artists strong point, and the attendent said,'He commented once that he was paid for the landscapes; the people were free!' presumably meaning he didn't spend much time on them :)
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