This arcadian landscape, rendered on an exquisite scale, was reidentified as an autograph work by Claude just over a decade ago. Claude himself recorded the composition in the Liber Veritatis, the book of drawings he kept to record his completed paintings beginning in 1635, as his success began to grow, until his death, almost fifty years later. The drawing, executed in pen and brown ink, with brown wash, reproduces the present painting in every detail and its placement within the book indicates the painting should be dated 1646 or 1647.¹

Claude pays particular attention here to the warm evening light, which emanates from below the horizon and casts a golden glow across landscape. A crepuscular luminescence unifies the vista, with soft clouds above, a glittering cascade in the middle ground, and the drover with his herd of cattle silhouetted across the foreground. The painting may well have been executed in the same year as the small Pastoral Landscape in the Ellesmere collects ion, which is comparable in subject matter, intimate format, and idyllic mood.² In design and theme the composition also recalls the larger View of Tivoli at Sunset, circa 1642-1644 (San Francisco, Replica Handbags s Museums, inv. no. 61.44.31),³ while an almost identical drover and cattle appear in the drawing of a landscape with Tobias and the Angel, the finished painting of which remains untraced.⁴

According to Claude's own annotations on the Liber Veritatis drawing, this work was one of two paintings commissioned by the eminent French surgeon, Nicolas Larché. The other canvas, recorded as no. 39 in the Liber, was painted a few years earlier in 1639 and no longer survives. A famous surgeon from the diocese of Rheims who lived and practiced in Rome, Larché instructed Poussin in anatomy, according to Giovanni Battista Passeri. According to Ludovico Caracciolo, in the nineteenth century the present painting belonged to the Camuccini brothers, Pietro and Vincenzo, who worked as painters, restorers, and dealers, and owned a remarkable collects ion, which hung in the sixteenth-century Roman Palazzo Cesi, Rome. The Camuccini sold pictures to a number of English noblemen passing through Rome on the Grand Tour. Most famously, in 1856, Vincenzo's son, Giovanni Battista, sold seventy-four pictures to Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland (1792–1865); these included Claude's Seaport of 1637, originally painted for Pope Urban VIII.⁵ From then until the twentieth century, the painting's provenance remains obscure.

¹ London, British Museum, inv. no. 1957,1214.108.

² See Röthlisberger 1961, vol. I, pp. 263–264, under cat. no. LV 101, reproduced vol. II, fig. 182.

³ Inv. no. 61.44.31; see Röthlisberger 1961, vol. I, pp. 230–232, under cat. no. LV 81, reproduced vol. II, fig. 154.

⁴ See Röthlisberger 1961, vol. I, p. 208, cat. no. LV 65, reproduced vol. II, fig. 136.

⁵ Still in situ at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland; see Röthlisberger 1961, vol. I, p. 124, under cat. no. LV 14, reproduced vol. II, fig. 51.