Stop and Look: A River Landscape with Jacob and Laban and his Daughters
Calm, luminous calm: this is a picture that exudes tranquillity and light. And it achieves that not by being static and brilliantly lit, it does it, rather, by careful measurement: by balancing forms in the picture space and distributing areas of light and shade in telling proportions.
The lapis lazuli sky fades towards the distant horizon, which we can see is far off, across all the features that lie between us and the farthest hills. We can measure the recession in terms of the movement of the eye from foreground figures to a seven-arched bridge and interlocking spurs of land, distant water and hazy mountains. The softly clouded sky is bright behind the contrasting mass of foliage in the group of trees placed at the point of the golden section – the proportion expressed mathematically as 1.618, or the relation between the whole width of the picture and the larger space to the left of the trees.
The result of these calculated intervals, both laterally across the picture and into the depth of the landscape, is an equilibrium that satisfies the eye while not insisting on its geometrical precision. It is softened by the organic forms of the trees, the curve of the river, the delicate light on water, on a cluster of buildings beyond the trees, and on the distant hills. The bright colours of the foreground group of figures are the only moment in the design that breaks away from this gently constructed symphony of interrelated spaces and softly lit objects.
The figures need to be clearly identifiable since they are the characters of the little drama that takes place in the landscape setting. The story of Jacob and the two daughters of his uncle Laban, Leah and Rachel, is told in the Bible: Genesis, chapters 29-30: Jacob fell in love with Rachel and to earn her as his bride worked seven years for Laban, tending his flocks. Rachel, however, proved barren and Jacob was told he should have married Leah, the elder daughter. It’s an involved tale, and here provides a specific theme of (not always harmonious) human relations to counterpoint the abstract theme of perfect pictorial harmony. Claude’s public preferred his landscapes to have some ostensible serious purpose, literary or Biblical, other than simply presenting a beautiful view.
But as we’ve seen, his landscape is in itself a serious subject: an essay in subtle proportion, the most delicate of effects of light, and the convincing representation of space and atmosphere in a two-dimensional oil painting. These were not entirely new ideas in the history of art, but Claude presented them with an accuracy of observation and a virtuoso refinement that were indeed quite new. They were seen as important developments by his many influential patrons in seventeenth-century Rome, where he worked, although he was a Frenchman, almost all his life. Claude created an “ideal” landscape that established a pictorial standard that remained unchallenged for two centuries and continues to this day as a powerful influence on the way we see the natural world.