Landscape with the Embarkation of Saint Paula Romana at Ostia

Around 1639 Claude Lorrain was painting a set of landscapes in Rome for a distant patron, Philip IV of Spain, to hang in his new pleasure palace, the Buen Retiro, in Madrid. Claude gave him this glowing, invented harbour. The subject is a departure. Saint Paula, a Roman widow, is leaving the city in the 4th century to join Saint Jerome in the Holy Land and a life of penance. But the small figures boarding the boat matter less than the port itself, palaces receding on either side, ships at anchor, the water carrying the light straight back toward a low sun. Claude never saw Ostia like this. He built the ancient Roman port from imagination, the kind of luminous seaport that buyers across Europe soon wanted from him by the pair.