Sketch of Foliage and Branches

Claude Lorrain · c. 1645–50

Medium

Black chalk, white and gray gouache, on tan laid paper, laid down on perimeter to cream wove card

Original size

39.3 × 23.2 cm (15 1/2 × 9 3/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Few drawings reveal an artist's eye for light quite like Claude Lorrain's intimate studies of trees and undergrowth, and this chalk sketch from the mid-1640s is a quietly beautiful example of that gift. Lorrain was the dominant landscape painter of seventeenth-century Rome, and his drawings were never mere preparation — they were acts of sustained looking. Working outdoors in the Roman Campagna and the wooded hills around Tivoli, he filled sketchbooks with studies like this one, using black chalk to map the weight of branches and gouache to catch the way light breaks through canopy. The tan laid paper itself becomes part of the composition, standing in for midtone and unifying the whole. What survives in this sheet is something studios of his era rarely preserved: the spontaneous, unresolved quality of direct observation, before classical convention tidied everything up. Lorrain's tree studies were admired and collected even in his own lifetime, prized as evidence of his working method. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates those chalked lines and gouached highlights into richly layered paint, preserving the tonal delicacy of the original while giving the work the depth and presence that only oil on canvas can bring.