Ink and Light: The Influence of Claude Lorrain’s Etchings on England

Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), an eminent seventeenth-century landscape painter, was an equally talented graphic artist. Lorrain’s etchings match the mastery and execution of his paintings and yet are largely unrecognized by contemporary collectors and art historians. Andrew Brink, an astute and discriminating art collector, amassed an impressive collection of etchings, engravings, and mezzotints by European master printmakers from the sixteenth century onwards. The keystone works in the Brink Collection, now housed in Guelph, Ontario’s Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, are by Claude Lorrain. In Ink and Light, Brink positions Lorrain’s prints as seminal to the establishment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetics in England, which gave rise to the English pictorialism in art and landscape architecture that would have international influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He discusses the technical and material character of Lorrain’s etchings, as well as their connection to literature and philosophy in early modern times. While Brink’s main focus is the impact of the etchings, he also looks at paintings and drawings by Lorrain, in addition to works made by other artists after Lorrain. Featuring forty of Claude Lorrain’s etchings from the Brink Collection, Ink and Light fills a significant gap in British art history by providing a close reading of Lorrain’s prints, their reception in England, and the enduring impact they had on a distinctive British aesthetic.