In Modern Painters V (1860) Ruskin maintained that large 'admiration of Claude is wholly impossible in any period of national vigour in art' ( Works, 7.322). Ruskin's early view of Claude was positive. Yet the stern critical perspective on the seventeenth-century French master adopted by 1843 changed very little during the seventeen years in which he wrote Modern Painters. Although Ruskin accepted that Claude, who is discussed in every volume of Modern Painters, was a painter of skill, elegance and formal grace, Ruskin believed that the artist lacked reverence and humility before nature. Claude's understanding of nature was, in Ruskin's view, his primary failure. This perception produced an enslavement to the conventions of painting and a consequent incapacity to represent nature in all its complexity and beguiling detail: truth to nature, in Ruskin's view the key to Turner's genius, was entirely absent from Claude's work. In Lectures on Architecture and Painting Ruskin dismissed Claude as embodying 'the foolish pastoralism' of his age and society (12.120). Ruskin's condemnation of Claude, particularly in volume one of Modern Painters, needs to viewed in the context of nineteenth-century taste. Ruskin used both Claude and Gaspard Poussin strategically: their classical mode of painting, established as a benchmark of bourgeois refinement in nineteenth-century England, is continually read by Ruskin in unfavourable comparison with the transcendent beauty of Turner's landscapes. Ruskin believed that Claude's influence on Turner had been overstated. In parallel with his view of the Renaissance architecture and art of Venice, Ruskin associated Claude with an absence of religious belief and disputed the idea that the French painter represented a true classicism. Indeed Claude is briefly discussed in The Stones of Venice where he is dismissed for 'the confectionery idealities' of his work. In Modern Painters II (1846) Ruskin also charged Claude with a dearth of imagination: 'Of men of name, perhaps Claude is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of expression' ( Works, 4.243).