Ruskin's view of Claude as a negative influence on European art and taste was a challenge to almost three centuries of wide critical reverence for the painter. Claude was highly successful in his own lifetime; he had many prominent patrons and, as Langdon observes, he 'painted for the Popes and great Italian aristocrats' (Langdon, Claude Lorrain, p.9). Everything that he painted during the last thirty five years of his life sold to prominent European collectors. His work was valued very highly in Britain and from the early eighteenth century Claude Lorrain's interpretation of landscape was regarded as the apogee of nature painting. Jonathan Richardson's celebrated Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings, and Pictures in Italy (1722), a work often used by Englishmen when taking the Grand Tour, proclaimed that 'Of all the Landskip-Painters Claude Lorrain has the most Beautiful, and Pleasing Ideas; the most Rural and of our own Times'. Later in the eighteenth century, Sir Joshua Reynolds, certainly the most influential writer on painting in his own time and a figure whose concepts continued to shape artistic practice well into the nineteenth-century, outlined his aesthetic theory. He argued that a 'mere copier of nature can never produce anything great' and suggested that artists need to transcend the limits of mimesis and translate only the most edifying and pleasing aspects of landscape on to the canvas (Discourse III, 14 December 1770). This perspective lead to Reynolds's celebration of Claude's art in contrast with the Dutch school and, in particular, the painting of Rubens (see Reynolds, Discourses IV, 10 December 1771).