Claude’s record of his own pictures: some two hundred drawings, in pen and wash, of the paintings as they left his studio, with notes on the back of who they were for. The measurements of his seaports in this book are taken from the paintings it records.
By the late 1630s copies and imitations of Claude’s pictures were being sold in Rome under his name. Filippo Baldinucci, who wrote his life, says that Claude began the book while painting for Philip IV of Spain, so that when a picture was brought to him to ask whether it was his, he could look in it. Baldinucci calls it the Libro d’Invenzioni or Libro di Verità; in England it came to be called the Liber Veritatis (Dullea, 1887, pages 49 and 50).
The drawings carry Claude’s monogram on the front and, on the back, notes in a mixture of Latin, French and Italian on the patron and the date. The book belonged to the Dukes of Devonshire from the eighteenth century and has been in the British Museum since 1957. Richard Earlom engraved all its drawings in mezzotint for John Boydell (1774–77), and his prints carried Claude’s compositions all over Europe.