Pure as Italian air, calm, beautiful and serene, springs forward the works of and with them the name of Claude Lorrain. The golden orient or the amber-coloured ether, the midday ethereal vault and fleecy skies, resplendent valleys, campagnas rich with all the cheerful blush of fertilization, trees possessing every hue and tone of summer's evident heat...' (quotation attributed to J.M.W. Turner, Langdon, Claude Lorrain, p.9).
Turner's appreciation of Claude is in stark contradistinction to Ruskin 's intense depreciation of the seventeenth-century French master. Anthony Blunt (1953) has argued that Claude's major claim to importance in the tradition of French and Roman painting is that he 'established landscape as a means of artistic expression as subtle and varied as the older genres of religious and historical painting' ( Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, p.178). However, Ruskin's view of Claude emphasised that Turner's reputation had been damaged by admiration for only those of his paintings that seemed to echo Claude's pastoral images.