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Claude Gellée ( also Claude Lorrain, also Le Lorrain )
1600 - 1682
Claude Gellée (called Lorrain after his birthplace in France) was one of the many Northern European artists drawn to Italy. Orphaned as a child and poorly educated, he initially traveled to Rome to work as a pastry cook. His first important master was the landscape artist and decorator Agostino Tassi.
By the 1630s Claude's reputation as a landscape painter was such that he was attracting imitators. His landscape style combined classical ideals of beauty and harmony with a sensitive and acute observation of nature. Most of all Claude was fascinated by light.

Pastoral Landscape

Claude Gellee (Lorrain) (1600 - 1682), oil on canvas, 1646-47, 40 3/8 x 52 1/4 in.

The painting shown here clearly reflects a contemporary description of his methods: "He tried by every means to penetrate nature, lying in the fields before the break of day and until night in order to learn to represent very exactly the red morning-sky, sunrise, and sunset and the evening hours."

Source: http://gort.ucsd.edu/sj/timken/t-claude.html

Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), French painter, a master of 17th-century ideal landscape painting. He was born in the duchy of Lorraine and lived in Rome most of his life. Claude's particular contribution to the ideal landscape was his masterly treatment of light. His early landscapes often featured experimental lighting effects. He produced idealized scenes of seaports, usually picturing ships at anchor in a harbor with palaces nearby.
After 1640 his paintings became more tranquil, bathed in a warm, even light. He drew his subject matter from classical or biblical sources, as in Landscape: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (1648, National Gallery, London). During the 1660s some of his works revealed a tendency toward a more visionary, symbolic style, with a color range of cool, silvery tones and a renewed use of dramatic lighting. His art influenced Dutch, French, and especially English landscape painters.

Source: http://www.televisual.net/uffizi/c_lorrai.html

Claude Gellée, known as Lorrain (1600-1682), after the place of his birth, worked a great deal in Italy, particularly in Rome where he settled. He also received a number of commissions from Queen Christina of Sweden, who liked to be amongst artists and scholars. He mostly painted landscapes, dedicating much passion and sensitivity to the genre, and recreating historic moments from the past, as well as mythological subjects.
His best known works include Narcissus and Echo and Agar and the Angel at the National Gallery in London, the Pastoral Scene at the City of Birmingham Art Gallery and the Port with Medici Villa at the Uffizi, wrapped in a golden atmosphere which almost immobilises the scene, making all the more precious the depiction of the ships and buildings that Lorrain had seen in Italy.

Source: http://www.televisual.net/uffizi/c_lorrai.html

Lorrain, Claude, byname of Claude Gellée (b. 1600, Chamagne, Fr., d. Nov. 23, 1682, Rome). French artist best known for, and one of the greatest masters of, ideal-landscape painting, an art form that seeks to present a view of nature more beautiful and harmonious than nature itself. The quality of that beauty is governed by classical concepts, and the landscape often contains classical ruins and pastoral figures in classical dress. The source of inspiration is the countryside around Rome, the Roman Campagna, a countryside haunted with remains and associations of antiquity.
The practitioners of ideal landscape during the 17th century, the key period of its development, were artists of many nationalities congregated in Rome. Later, the form spread to other countries. Claude, whose special contribution was the poetic rendering of light, was particularly influential, not only during his lifetime but, especially in England, from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. [Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1994]

Source: http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/wm/paint/auth/lorrain/

Claude Lorrain was French painter who ranks up with Nicolas Poussin as one of the great masters of 17th-century ideal-landscape painting. Drawing its inspiration from classical antiquity, this school of painting presents nature as harmonious, serene, and often majestic. Subject matter is taken from Greek, Roman, or biblical sources, and human figures in the landscape are often in pastoral or antique dress. Claude's particular contribution to the ideal landscape was his masterly treatment of light. From his early paintings, which have strong, dramatic lighting effects, to his later ones, which are softly drenched with limpid light, he was unsurpassed as a luminist.
Claude, who was also known by his pseudonym Le Lorrain, or as Claude Lorraine, was born in the duchy of Lorraine (from which his name is derived). He traveled to Rome before he was 20 years old and, with the exception of one trip back to France from 1625 to 1627, he lived in Rome all his life. His principal teacher was the Italian painter Agostino Tassi, who tutored him in the elements of landscape, seascape, and perspective. He was also influenced by the German painter Adam Elsheimer, whose strong lighting Claude adapted and refined, and by the Italian painters Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, whose monumental landscapes led him to enlarge his scale.
Claude's gradual stylistic evolution falls into three main periods. His early landscapes often featured slanting light and employed other experimental lighting effects. He also produced idealized scenes of seaports, usually picturing ships at anchor in a harbor flanked by palaces. In Harbor Scene (1634, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg) he shows the sun on the horizon, and characteristically uses the sun to give the painting depth. To guard against forgeries of his work that began cropping up in the 1630s,
Claude began compiling his Liber Veritatis (Latin for "Book of Truth"; British Museum, London) in about 1635. In it he sketched drawings of almost all his paintings, creating a record of his work. After 1640 his paintings became more tranquil, bathed in a warm, even light. Their subject matter is drawn from classical or biblical sources, as in Landscape: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (1648, National Gallery, London). During the 1660s, although Claude continued to work in his prior mode, some of his works showed a tendency toward a more visionary, symbolic style, with a color range of cool, silvery tones and a renewed use of dramatic lighting.
Claude died in Rome on November 23, 1682. His art influenced later Dutch, French, and especially English landscape painters through the middle of the 19th century. J. M. W. Turner was especially indebted to Claude and was inspired by his compositions.

Source: http://www.hol.gr/cjackson/lorrain/lorrain_bio.htm

Claude (Lorrain) Glass
Black convex glass used by artists to reflect the landscape in miniature and, in doing so, to merge details and reduce the strength of colour so that the artist is presented with a broad picture of the scene and a certain tonal unity.

Source: http://www.eb.com/cgi-bin/g?keywords=Claude%20Lorrain%20glass
also...
Claude Glass, a smoked convex lens used for viewing landscapes, its name derives from the artist Claude Lorraine who reputedly used one. Its effect was two fold; first, its convex lens pulled a landscape together, producing a pleasing repoussoir composition; second, the glass darkened the scene, obliterating detail and rendering it in chiaroscuro. Artists and writers on the picturesque used the glass to see the landscape as they would wish to portray it.

Picturesque, C18 aesthetic concept applied on to scenes which occupy the mid-ground between the ideal landscapes of the C17 and the sublime landscapes of Romanticism. The leading advocate of the picturesque, William Gilpin, in his Three Essays on the Picturesque, (1792) defines picturesque as that which stimulates the imagination to reverie or admiration. To call and landscape picturesque was to mean it had picturesque potential, and many artists used a Claude glass to concentrate the picturesque qualities under observation. Repoussoir (Fr. repousser, to push back), pictorial device much used by academic landscape painters in which elements in the forground are used to `frame' the composition. Thus Claude Lorraine in `Landscape with the Father of Psyche sacrificing to Apollo' (1660-70) has placed a copse of trees, typicially rendered as near-silhouettes, to the right foreground and a classical temple to the left, thereby prompting the eye to wander toward a distant seaport and mountains painted with a very pale palette. Repoussoir, a means of `setting back' part of the composition, is most often used in conjunction with the recessional devices of linear and aerial perspective. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960).

Source: http://rubens.anu.edu.au/imageserve/reference/eah/

Picturesque is taken from the Italian word "pittoresco", that means "pertaining to a painter". In the eighteenth century the word referred to the fact that a landscape appeared as if it had just come out of a picture: paintings by Claude and Poussin are excellent examples of this first meaning of picturesque. Now, however, the meaning has changed to mean that a certain scene (whether it is landscape, marketplace, buildings or whatever) is considered a worthwhile subject for an artist to depict in his or her works. During the eighteenth century, there was quite a controversy over the meaning of picturesque; Jane Austen, the author, satirized picturesque in her book "Sense and Sensibility". Arising out of the controversy was a new definition of beauty, that was composed of a certain roughness, irregularity and some deformity. The Romantic artists of the nineteenth century used these ideas and definitions as a jumping-off place for their own artwork.

Source: http://www.jonessquare.com/art-square/eoa1/dictfive.html

I have accumulated a fair bit of evidence of historic access to this hill. Apparently it was one of the seven 'stations' around Derwentwater which were visited by Victorian tourists. It was the custom to turn one's back on the scene and view it through a convex mirror, a Claude Glass, to better appreciate its artistic qualities.

Source: http://www.personal.u-net.com/~keswick/ldw.htm

Thomas West's First Station on Lake Windermere was the late-eighteenth century equivalent of Point Lobos. It was the most highly recommended station (or picture-spot) in West's Guide to the Lakes (1778). From the picture-windowed bays of this octagonal "pleasure house," the three most celebrated views in the English Lakes could be savored by means of the Claude Glass or captured in sketches and watercolors.

Source: http://sumweb.syr.edu/com_dark/PFAHL2.HTML

I identify as I turn around: Langdale Pikes, Brothers Water, Rydal Water, Ambleside, Windermere, Elterwater, a sky full of drifting clouds above and high, quiet hills of greenery dotted with sheep below. One would hardly know where to turn one's Claude Glass in order to capture the best prospect.

Source: http://orion.it.luc.edu/~sjones1/column4.htm

The Art Pack/a Unique, Three-Dimensional Tour Through the Creation of Art over the Centuries : What Artists Do, How They Do It, and the Masterpieces; Helen Frayling, et al; Hardcover; List $45.00, CyberAntiqueMall Price: $40.50; Great for a gift: Filled with pop-ups, pull-outs, a mobile, and other delightful learning tools, The Art Pack is a unique way to experience artists' use of color, line, composition, perspective, and optics, as well as a lavishly illustrated introduction to the history of Western art and an audio guide to 20 of the greatest pictures of all time. Includes a perspective viewer, a filtered Claude Glass, and more. Nine spreads.

Source: http://www.cyberantiquemall.com/bookstore/artbooks.html

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