'[B]efore Claude the Roman Campagna had generally been an object of interest rather than of aesthetic admiration to artists... It had been studied with the eyes of curiosity; Claude saw it with the eyes of wonder' ( Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, p.180). Blunt's twentieth-century assessment of Claude suggests the esteem in which the artist's nature painting was widely held in his own historical moment. The respect for Claude did not come to an abrupt ending with Ruskin's iconoclastic reading of his work in 1843. Indeed before writing Modern Painters Ruskin appreciated aspects of Claude's representation of nature. In a letter to his friend, the Rev. Edward Clayton, written in September 1840, Ruskin located the artist in a tradition of painters whose engagement with nature, though different in emphasis, was notably acute:
Have you not sometimes wondered why, if the object of art be mere servility of imitation of nature, there were as many styles as there were great artists? The true reason is that each great artist conveys to you, not so much the scene, as the impression of the scene on his own originality of mind. Ruysdael looks to nature for her freshness and purity,-Rubens for her glory of colour,-Poussin for her tumult,-Salvator for her energy,-Claude for her peace,- Turner (I rise to a climax) for her mystery and divinity. ( Works, 1.421)
Ruskin's later attitude to Claude's nature painting is richly ambivalent. In Modern Painters IV Ruskin was critical of the 'vague conventionalism' (6.432) of Claude's mountains and in volume V he stated that
The admiration of [Claude's] works was legitimate, so far as it regarded their sunlight effects and their graceful details. It was base, in so far as it involved irreverence both for the deeper powers of nature, and carelessness as to conception of subject. ( Works, 7.322)