The first great history of art in German, by a painter who had worked in Rome in the 1630s. Among the lives of the artists he knew there is Claude’s: Sandrart sketched with him at Tivoli and describes how he studied the light of the sky out of doors, from before dawn until night.
Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688), from Frankfurt, trained under Gerrit van Honthorst in Utrecht and was in Rome from about 1629 to 1635, where he knew Poussin and Claude. His Teutsche Academie is a treatise on architecture, sculpture and painting, a translation and extension of Vasari and Van Mander, and a set of lives of the painters of his own day, many of whom he had met.
His account of Claude is the earliest by someone who watched him work. It is quoted here in the English of O. J. Dullea’s Claude Gellée le Lorrain (London, 1887), pages 16 and 17.
The book, part by part
I The life of Claude
Claude’s study of nature in the open air, from before dawn until nightfall; his colours mixed before the scene; sketching together at Tivoli, Frascati and Subiaco.