Rest on the Flight into Egypt
Claude Lorrain (French, 1604–1682)
early 1640s
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 239 x 185 x 12 cm (94 1/8 x 72 13/16 x 4 3/4 in.); Unframed: 208 x 152.5 cm (81 7/8 x 60 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
One of the most influential landscape painters of the early modern era, Lorrain was a master of the “ideal landscape,” which combined lush foliage and a tranquil atmosphere with allusions to an idyllic, imaginary past. The intention was to create views more beautiful and harmonious than nature itself. In the foreground of this soaring landscape, the Holy Family rests on a shady bank as kneeling angels offer fruit to the Christ child. Landscape paintings like this were much in demand among wealthy collectors throughout Europe, for whom these expansive idealized scenes represented a calm retreat from their hectic city lives.
