Coast Scene with the Port of Santa Marinella

Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Claude Lorrain was the most famous and most sought-after landscape painter working in Rome in the 17th century. He made numerous plein air studies in the countryside around Rome and then incorporated his knowledge of nature and light into his painted compositions. This sheet is one of a pair of presentation drawings made for Pope Urban VIII who commissioned from the artist a pair of small octagonal paintings on copper depicting sites associated with papal building projects. This one relates to a painting at the Petit Palais, Paris, Coast Scene with the Port of Santa Marinella (PDUT872), of the same size as the drawing. The pendant, Coast Scene with a View of Civitavecchia was not executed in oil. The subject seems to have been replaced by Pastoral Landscape with Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo, known through a painting in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (PD.950-1963).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art