A Rocky Hillside

Claude Lorrain · 1635/1636

Medium

Pen and brown ink, brush with brown, pink, and green wash, heightened with white gouache, over traces of red chalk, on cream laid paper

Original size

20.9 × 27.6 cm (8 1/4 × 10 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

A Rocky Hillside reveals Claude Lorrain at his most immediate — a rapid, searching study of terrain that feels drawn directly from the Roman countryside rather than composed in a studio. Lorrain spent nearly his entire career in Rome, wandering the Campagna to sketch from life before translating those observations into grand, light-drenched landscapes. This 1635 work shows the full range of his draughtsmanship: red chalk underdrawing, pen outlines, layered washes of brown, pink, and green, then white gouache highlights pulling the rocky forms into relief. The result is a drawing that behaves almost like a painting, with atmospheric depth built through tone rather than line. Lorrain was so concerned with forgery during his lifetime that he maintained a bound volume of drawings recording every painting he made — the Liber Veritatis — a document now held at Chatsworth House and considered one of the great records of seventeenth-century artistic practice. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates the quiet authority of Lorrain's study into a format that lives on a wall — preserving the texture of the hillside, the warmth of the brown-and-pink palette, and the quality of afternoon light that made Claude Lorrain the most imitated landscape painter in Europe.