View of the Acqua Acetosa (recto); David and Goliath (verso) (c. 1645): Art, History and Details

View of the Acqua Acetosa (recto); David and Goliath (verso) (c. 1645) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Claude Lorrain (French, 1604–1682).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This drawing represents a view of the famous Acqua Acetosa, a mineral spring that until the 19th century provided the favored drinking water of Romans who believed in its healing powers. Although topographically accurate, the sheet is not a plein-air study but a vision of an imagined Arcadian world carefully rendered by Gellée, one of the most original painters of the 17th century. The French-born artist spent his career painting and drawing the Roman Campagna and the Neopolitan coastline. Sublimely beautiful pen-and-ink and wash drawings such as the example here reveal the artist's highly poetic response to the natural world and his unparalleled sensitivity to light.

Object facts

• Title: View of the Acqua Acetosa (recto); David and Goliath (verso)
• Date: c. 1645
• Creator attribution: Claude Lorrain (French, 1604–1682)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over graphite, framing lines in brown ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 26 x 40.5 cm (10 1/4 x 15 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1928.15

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward B. Greene

Further reading listed by the museum

• Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Gordon Bailey Washburn, and Agnes Mongan. Master Drawings, Selected from the Museums and Private Collections of America; January, 1935, the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. [Buffalo, N.Y.]: [F.W. Burow], 1935.
• Francis, Henry. "'Roman Campagna near Tivoli' by Claude Gellée de Lorrain." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 33, no. 10 (December 1946): 178-180.
• Lee, Sherman E. Chinese Landscape Painting. 1954.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.