This serene view is amongst the earliest of Claude’s celebrated harbour scenes, whose shimmering seas beneath skies tinged with the glow of a sunrise or sunset inspired John Constable to enthuse ‘Although Claude was a painter of fairyland, and sylvan scenery of the most romantic kind, he is nowhere seen to greater advantage than in his sea ports’ (Constable, Lecture II, The Establishment of Landscape, delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1834). Its rediscovery in 2015, having been lost to scholarship after disappearing into a South American collection, adds considerably to our knowledge of Claude’s early career, and to the history of Continental and English taste.

Born in a village near Nancy in the then-independent Duchy of Lorraine, Claude moved, possibly as early as 1617 when he was barely a teenager, to Rome, where his first biographer Joachim von Sandrart records him as working as a pastry cook. He soon travelled onward to Naples, where he studied for two years under the landscape painter Goffredo Wals, later returning to Rome to join the workshop of the landscape and architectural painter Agostino Tassi. In 1625, according to his second biographer, Filippo Baldinucci, Claude returned to Lorraine where he was employed by Claude Deruet, court painter to the Duke, and stayed for a year before returning once again to Rome, where he was to remain, apart from short trips elsewhere in Italy, for the rest of his long and highly productive life.

Like the vast majority of Claude’s oeuvre, this canvas would have been painted in Rome. Stylistically, it can be compared with other early harbour views, including one formerly in the collection of Barbara Piasecka Johnson and another universally accepted example in the collection of the Earls of Bute, in which the treatment of the figures and the tall-masted ships is all but identical. The handling of the foliage, spiky in its brushwork, is entirely typical of Claude at an early date, while the flickering rays of light illuminating the tips of the waves are comparable to what we see in other marines, such as the Hambledon picture. That our painting is broadly contemporaneous with the ex-Johnson canvas of circa 1630 is further indicated by the omission of both from the Liber Veritatis, the record book Claude began to keep after 1635. Its serene composition and the masterful handling of light prefigure all that Claude was to achieve in his maturity.

The painting’s prestigious provenance, which has been reinstated since its sale in 2015, name-checks various important figures in the history of British and Continental collecting. It can be traced back to the 18th Century, where it appears in the posthumous sale of one of the most significant female collectors of the era, Marie-Anne Bigot de Graveron, a contemporary of Louis XV. She sought out, in addition to masterpieces of painting, objet d’arts, prints, and curiosities, and she lived with her husband, Président Pierre-François Doublet de Bandeville, seigneur de Saint-Cyr et Bandeville près de Dourdan, between mansions in Passy and Paris. In the posthumous sale of her collection (her children having predeceased her) it was acquired by a M. Robit, whose extensive collection was also dispersed in a posthumous sale. Also in the sale was Murillo’s The Infant St. John with the Lamb now in the National Gallery, London, which is known to have been acquired by Paillet for Bryant and then exhibited for sale by Bryant in London (Nov. 1801 – May 1802), at which point it was sold, together with other works, to Sir Simon Clarke. It may have been the case that Clarke, who also owned the Claude, bought it at the same selling exhibition.

Sir Simon Clarke, then the seventh richest man in England, hung the Claude in his home at Oakhill, alongside other masterpieces now in the National Gallery in London. There it was described by the connoisseur, dealer and author John Smith as an ‘admirable picture…the whole is suffused with the warmth and brilliancy of a fine summer’s evening’, and valued at £1,500, an extremely high price at the time. Later in the 19th Century it passed through the collection of Yolande Lyne Stephens, a Parisian-born dancer who married Stephens Lyne Stephens (1801 – 1860), allegedly the richest commoner in England thanks to a staggeringly large inheritance. The couple also owned Watteau’s La Gamme d’Amour, now in London’s National Gallery.

The late Marcel Röthlisberger, who made many of his judgements on the basis of photographs and who questioned the attribution of this work, in all likelihood never saw it first-hand, as it was in a private South American collection at the time his catalogue raisonné was published. It is widely understood that his otherwise excellent catalogue largely overlooked Claude’s early works, having been substantially assembled on the basis of the Liber Veritatis, which the artist began more than a decade into his productive career. Likewise overlooked by Röthlisberger – and for similar reasons – was the superb early seaport from Hambleden Manor in Buckinghamshire, which reemerged in 2013 and fetched £4.45 million at auction. Upon seeing the Hambleden canvas first-hand, Röthlisberger immediately declared it ‘a great Claude’ and ‘a truly sensational discovery’, words that might equally well apply to the present work. Röthlisberger also rejected the Luton Hoo picture acquired by Sir Julius Wernher before 1912, which is indistinctly signed and dated 1653, and which was sold at auction as Claude in full in 1992.

More recently, the attribution to Claude has been endorsed by Jon Whitely, curator of the seminal Claude exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in 2011-12, who calls a ‘lovely Claude’ Fig. 3: Claude Lorrain, A Mediterranean port at sunrise, oil on canvas, Private Collection and a ‘very lively addition to the oeuvre’; by Helen Langdon, author of Claude Lorrain (1600 – 1682), who describes it as ‘an early Claude and a very attractive one’; and by Ian Kennedy, who wrote ‘Claude and Architecture’, published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol XXXV. We are grateful to these scholars for their help in cataloguing the painting.