Pastoral on Paper

3/8/2025–6/15/2025

Claude Lorrain

Landscape with the Voyage of Jacob

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with the Voyage of Jacob, 1677, oil on canvas.  The Clark, 1955.42

The Clark

This exhibition presents seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European books, drawings, and prints of idealized landscapes. Looking particularly at such familiar figures as Claude Lorrain and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as at Dutch Italianate artists like Nicolaes Berchem, Pastoral on Paper situates cows, mules, maidens, shepherds, ruins, and overgrown landscapes within the rise of pastoral imagery in the early modern imagination. Exploring the romantic and historicizing lenses through which many of the leading artists of the Baroque and Rococo periods represented rural life, this exhibition offers a fresh perspective on the emergence of landscape as an independent genre.

Pastoral on Paper is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by William Satloff, second-year student in the Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art.