The British interest in Claude Lorrain began during the artist’s lifetime. In 1644, an unidentified Englishman commissioned two of Claude’s landscapes: Landscape with Narcissus and Echo and A Temple of Bacchus (Humphrey Wine, National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth Century French Paintings, London: National Gallery, 2001, 88). By the beginning of the nineteenth century Claude had assumed an unassailable position, described by John Constable as “the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw” (R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Discourses, Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970, 52). The influence of Claude on British art has perhaps not surprisingly generated a great deal of scholarship, ranging from Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring’s Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925) to the recent exhibition Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude at the National Gallery, London (Ian Warrell, Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude, exh. cat., London: National Gallery, 2012). Andrew Brink’s Ink and Light: The Influence of Claude Lorrain’s Etchings on England therefore treads familiar territory.

Published by the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (MSAC) in Guelph, Ontario, to commemorate an exhibition held in 2013 of forty prints from the collection of the author, Andrew Brink (part of a promised gift to MSAC of six hundred European prints), the text comprises an essay establishing elements of Claude’s influence on English culture, a short biographical account of Claude’s life, a checklist of the exhibition, and an account of Brink’s activities as a collector of prints. The essay, in turn, is split into four chapters: “Claude Lorrain’s Etchings in England,” “Claudian Architecture,” “Original and Reproductive Prints,” and “Themes in the Etchings.”

The central thesis of the book—and Brink’s collection—is that Claude’s etchings, as distinct from his paintings or drawings, had an enormous impact upon British culture. Brink argues that the forty-four prints attributed to Claude by Lino Mannocchi in The Etchings of Claude Lorrain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) were an inspiration to artists, architects, landscape gardeners, and engravers alike. Readers are told, for example, that “close inspection of the etchings reveals much architectural detail that would have intrigued innovative English aesthetes” (66). Brink speculates that it was the “asymmetrical” arrangement of buildings in Claude’s etching Le Temps, Apollon, et les Saisons which “[Richard Payne] Knight chose to do in the 1770s while designing Downton Castle, a prototype for the shift in English Architectural tastes” (67). Certainly Knight’s adoption of picturesque landscaping was informed, in part, by his interest in Claude, but to suggest his house was consciously modeled on Claude’s prints seems a stretch.

Far from Claude’s prints being influential, it is possible to argue the opposite. Brink quotes Jonathan Richardson as considering Claude’s etchings as “dirty” and “disgusting.” In fact, these are the words of William Gilpin, the great theoretician of the picturesque, and not Richardson. In the 1792 edition of Richardson’s Works published by Horace Walpole, Gilpin’s An Essay on the Knowledge of Prints was appended anonymously. Nonetheless, Gilpin’s can be taken as a fairly representative starting point. Gilpin felt Claude’s etchings “are below his character; there is often good composition in them, but nothing else; his execution is bad, and there is a dirtiness in them disgusting, his lights seldom well massed, and his distances only sometimes observed; his talents lie upon his pallet” (Horace Walpole, ed., The Works of Jonathan Richardson, Strawberry Hill, 1792, 271). Gilpin was one of the great translators and champions of a Claudian aesthetic in Britain. It was Gilpin, more than almost anyone, who understood the power and importance of Claude’s compositions. But as a connoisseur of prints he felt the etchings were not as powerful as the paintings or drawings. Brink offers no counter evidence of their appreciation during the eighteenth century in Britain. Even more problematically, he provides no evidence for the circulation of the prints themselves during the eighteenth century to substantiate his claims about their influence.

Here lies the problem with the book. While many of the themes Brink explores unquestionably apply to Claude’s works, they do not apply exclusively to the prints. The reproductive works he mentions are not after Claude’s engravings but after his drawings or paintings. Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton’s A Collection of Etchings and Engravings in Imitation of Drawings from Various Old Masters, Being Facsimiles of Their Respective Performances, Chiefly by Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton (1734) was a major work in spreading Richardson’s ideas about connoisseurship. It is also difficult to underestimate the importance the Liber Veritatis (Claude’s sketchbook record of his finished compositions) had on the British taste for Claude. It was the subject of a sumptuous facsimile made by Richard Earlom and widely disseminated. Again discussion of the reception of these prints and their ownership by British collectors and artists would have strengthened the book’s arguments.

Claude’s prints themselves are intelligently discussed; their qualities as works of art are carefully examined. But it is only in the section entitled “Collecting Claude” that readers find mention of the history of Claude’s plates, of the proliferation of impressions produced after 1819 in London, and the continuing difficulties of connoisseurship. (This is the subject of Mannocchi’s important study, The Etchings of Claude Lorrain). In fact a large number of Brink’s own collection consists of later pulls, rendering many of his assessments difficult to substantiate, a fact which is not foregrounded sufficiently.

Annoying inaccuracies dog the text. Brink and his editors seem unaware of the difference between Britain and England, and the two are elided continually. English titles cause great confusion; Thomas Coke was in fact Earl of Leicester, not 1st Lord Leicester, for example. Claude’s Liber Veritatis was not at Chatsworth House from 1728; it was kept at Devonshire House in London, where it was accessible to both scholars and painters.¹ There are also bizarre omissions. Claude’s contemporary Gaspard Dughet is not mentioned anywhere in the text, and Salvator Rosa, whose etchings of the Figurine enjoyed continual fame in Britain during the eighteenth century, is only referred to in passing. At no point is there any attempt to engage with fully the paintings by Claude in British collections and their potential influence, or the number of Claude’s extant drawings in British collections. Visiting London in 1728, Pierre Jacques Fougeroux noted that Richardson owned “plus de Soixante desseins de Claude Lorain.” I count nine autograph drawings by Claude in the British Museum with a Richardson provenance alone, which gives a sense of the volume of available material by the artist in early eighteenth-century London (Pierre Jacques Fougeroux, 89).

Ink and Light is the work of a passionate collector who took evident delight in “foraging for small treasures” and then researching the resulting collection. While not a major contribution to Claude scholarship, or literature on the reception of Claude in Britain, it is a deeply personal encomium for the work of Claude as a printmaker and acts as a fitting memorial to the author’s generosity.