Landscape with the Temptations of Saint Anthony

Philip IV had the Buen Retiro built on the eastern edge of Madrid in the early 1630s, and then had to fill it. Around 1635 the order went out through the Spanish embassy in Rome, and half a dozen painters working there, Claude and Poussin among them, began turning out landscapes for a gallery none of them would ever see. This one is Claude's, from about 1638, and it is a night piece, which is rare in his work. The light is the moon behind the arch, and the demons' small fires burn red inside the ruin. Saint Anthony sits at the foot of the tree. The scholar Marcel Röthlisberger judged that figure to be the work of an assistant rather than Claude's own, though the museum still gives the picture to Claude without qualification. Claude also kept a book of drawings after his finished paintings, so that he could prove which ones were his once copies began to circulate. This composition is number 32 in it, marked in his hand per il Re di Spagna, for the King of Spain.