Ruskin 's relationship with France is problematic. He enjoyed visiting the country throughout his life and engaged with many aspects of French culture, including literature, art and architecture, until the end of his career. A number of Ruskin's many visits to the Louvre are documented in his diaries and included by Cook and Wedderburn. Ruskin regarded certain French writers, including Molière and Marmontel, with admiration. Yet a country that was both Roman Catholic and revolutionary provided a Protestant-monarchist with intellectual and aesthetic challenges. The paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet (known to Ruskin as Gaspar Poussin) are important for Ruskin because theirs are the first major schools of art to which he publicly and vehemently took exception. In the first volume of Modern Painters the intensity of Ruskin's praise for Turner was supported by the extent of his censure of these seventeenth-century 'French' painters. His aesthetic was founded on an explicitly Christian and, indeed Romantic, commitment of truth to nature, one of the great texts of divine will, second only in Ruskin's world-view to the Bible. In Ruskin's view Claude, Gaspar Poussin and the Italian Salvator Rosa, were culpable of breaking this covenant. Ruskin's desire to re-educate the Victorian eye is neatly exemplified in his response to Claude and the Poussins. He believed that Claude's understanding of nature was poor and that the wide veneration for the painter's form of ideal landscape had been a pernicious influence on European aesthetics. Ruskin confessed that his own knowledge and interest in modern French painting was limited. The national and artistic identity of Claude, Gaspard Dughet/Poussin and Nicolas Poussin is complex and it is misleading to describe them simply as French painters.