Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain painted light. His landscapes and seaports are built around the sun, often low on the horizon, casting a golden glow over classical buildings, trees and calm water. The figures from myth and the Bible are small, and he joked that he charged for the landscape and gave the figures away free.

Born in Chamagne in the Duchy of Lorraine, he went to Rome as a young man and spent almost his whole life there, becoming the leading landscape painter in Italy. To guard against forgeries he kept a record of his finished paintings in drawings, the Liber Veritatis, now in the British Museum. His ideal landscapes shaped English taste for centuries, and Constable called him the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw. His work hangs in the National Gallery in London, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In A Seaport at Sunrise, look at how the light comes straight towards you across the water.