SF exhibit offers glimpse of rare beauty.

It’s not often that we have the chance to experience the best that the world has to offer. I strongly recommend that everyone within range of these words make a pilgrimage to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in the next week to see the exhibition Claude Lorraine: The Painter as Draftsman. Along with a dozen paintings, there are approximately 80 drawings—quite simply the most beautiful drawings of the landscape in the history of art.

Claude Lorraine (generally called Claude) was born in France in 1600 but lived his entire adult life in Rome. He achieved great fame, yet it seems he was a simple and uneducated man who nevertheless managed to inform his world and ours in major ways.

According to his fellow painter Sandrart, Claude would lie out in fields from dawn to dusk storing up the visual effects of light. In that way he was like the Impressionists who worked 200 years later. But unlike, say, Monet, whose impressions shattered the world into shimmering bits of color, Claude sought to present a cohesive naturalism: All of the chaotic elements of nature fell into a sense of poetic order.

His paintings invariably contained a detailed foreground, a middle ground of winding rivers or roads leading to an exquisite distance paled by sunlight and atmosphere. In the tradition of the “pastoral landscape,” Claude presented images of a wholeness that heightens our perception of a radiant world.

The process for making his landscapes was complex: Portable oil colors in tubes had not yet been invented. In addition to mental observations, Claude made ink-and-chalk on paper. These could be detailed, or very rapid and free, with all the vigor and angular dash of the 20th century Abstract Expressionists. Most of the drawings are in brown sepia ink which can add a hovering or seeping glow that might be compared to the deep spiritual hum of the paintings of Mark Rothko. He would return to the studio with these notations and impressions and use them to construct his large compositions.

Claude’s drawings are fundamentally different from the work of Impressionists or Abstract Expressionists, who were interested in line, shape and color. Often employing dashed lines, dragged brushes and blossoming washes, his drawings were not meant to be interesting in and of themselves. They were shorthand notes describing what he saw. As a result, they have a simple honesty and an almost religious belief in the beauty of nature.

In addition to these studies, this exhibition features drawings Claude made from the finished paintings, which he kept as records for his Liber Veritatis, or verification book. These drawings have a less searching look to them. Still, the pen and the brush dance across the surface of the paper; they possess an almost painfully naive completeness.

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After viewing the exhibition, I suggest going immediately to Golden Gate Park. The landscape there will be transformed. This is not coincidental. Claude had a huge influence on landscape architecture in 18th-century England, where parks were designed to look like Claude paintings in a style called “the picturesque landscape.” One of its proponents was the Scottish-born landscape architect John McLaren, who, along with William Hall, created Golden Gate Park.

The paintings and drawings of Claude Lorrain present us with a median world: a buffer zone between urban life and wilderness. They are timeless essays on mortality—the passing of a civilization or the closing of a day. They put us in mind of the beauty and fragility of our own mortality, the joy of attainment and the dearness of our natural world.  

THE PAINTER AS DRAFTSMAN closes Jan. 14. The Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park near Clement Street, is open Tuesday through Thursday. 415-863-3330 or thinker.org/legion.