Mill on a River

In July 1943, in the middle of the war, this landscape was sold at Christie's in London from the collection of Sir Berkeley Sheffield, catalogued as the work of a Dutch painter, van Everdingen. The next year the dealer Koetser sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts as a Claude, for 6,000 dollars, and in 1945 W. G. Constable, the museum's curator of paintings, published it in an article on Claude's early work. Part of the case is written on the picture itself. On a fallen pediment at the lower left are the remains of a signature and a date that seems to begin 163, and the rest is too worn to read with confidence. The museum gives it as 1631 with a question mark. If that reading is right, this would be one of the earliest paintings by Claude that we know, made only a few years after he settled in Rome. A river runs past a mill under a soft sky, with boats on the water and hills beyond. At the left an artist sits drawing a boy who is milking a goat, a small scene of everyday country life set into the view. Pictures of this kind were much admired by the next generation of painters in Rome, Dutch and Flemish artists among them.