70 CLAUDE LORRAIN Claude was one of the greatest of all landscape painters. Like his near­contemporary (Claude Gellee) • Nicolas Poussin, Claude spent most of his career in Rome, and his work was strongly French, 1600­1682 inspired by the Roman Campagna—the nearby countryside of plains, mountains, and Coast Scene with a Fight on a Boat sea so evocative of the pastoral serenity of a Golden Age. The basic themes of nature, the ideal, space, light, harmony, repose, biblical story, and classical myth interlock in Pen and brown ink and reddish­brown Claude's pictures to engender an extraordinarily poetic feeling. Perhaps more than wash, heightened with white bodycolor, on light­blue paper anything else, Claude showed his great mastery over light: his compositions portray 237 x 33.9 cm (9 3/8 x 13 5/16 in.) limpid skies and misty atmosphere that seem to sparkle from the trees, lakes, and Cat. I, no. 77; 82.GA.80 buildings. The drawing is a study, with differences, for the picture commissioned by Francois­ Annibal d'Estrees, Marquis de Coeuvres, the French ambassador in Rome from 1638 to 1641, now in a private collection, though it has also been suggested that it may be a ricordo (see no. 28) after the picture. The significance of the men on the boat fighting two on the shore is unclear; in the painting, as well as in a drawing in the British Museum, the skirmish takes place on a bridge and with more participants. 86 FRENCH SCHOOL