at a picture with little apparent progress); his painstaking
work, and his custom of keeping a book, in which he verified his
pictures, are about the most that I can tell you of the habits of one of
the foreign painters, who has been most fully represented in England,
and was long in the highest favour with English lovers of art. Claude
Lorraine died at Rome in the eighty-third year of his age, in 1682.

Claude Lorraine's name has become a very vexed name with art critics.
There was a time when he had an unsurpassed reputation as a landscape
painter. The possession of a Claude was enough to confer art glory on a
country-house, and possibly for this reason England, in public and
private collections, has more 'Claudes' than are held by any other
country. But Claude's admirers, among whom Sir George Beaumont, the
great art critic of his generation, took the lead, have had their day,
and, if they have not by any means passed away, are on the wane.

The wrathful indignation of the English landscape painter, Turner, at
the praise which was so glibly lavished on Claude--an indignation that
caused Turner to bequeath two of his own landscape paintings to the
trustees of the National Gallery, on the caustic condition that they
should always be placed between the two celebrated 'Claudes,' known as
'The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' and 'The Embarkation of the Queen of
Sheba'--helped to shake the English art world's faith in its former
idol. Mr Ruskin's adoption and proclamation of Turner's opinion shook
the old faith still further. This reversal of a verdict with regard to
Claude is peculiar; it is by no means uncommon for the decision of
contemporaries to be set aside, and we shall hear of an instance
presently, in the case of the painter Le Brun. In fact, it is often
ominous with regard to a man's future fame, when he is 'cried up to the
skies' in his own day. The probability may be that his easy success has
been won by something superficial and fleeting. But Claude's great
popularity has been in another generation, and with another nation.
English taste may have been in fault; or another explanation seems
preferable--that Claude's sense of beauty was great, with all its faults
of expression, and he gave such glimpses of a beautiful world as the
gazers on his pictures were capable of receiving, which to them proved
irresistible.

While Claude adopted an original style as a landscape painter, so far as
his contemporaries were