Port Scene with the Villa Medici

By 1637 the man from Lorraine was the landscape painter Rome's cardinals wanted, and this canvas went to one of them, possibly Cardinal Giovan Carlo de' Medici. That is why the building on the right is the Villa Medici, the family's own house up on the Pincio hill in Rome. Claude lifted it off its hill and set it on the edge of an imaginary harbour, looking out over a sea it never actually faced. Around it he painted his favourite hour: the sun low over the water, the light coming almost straight into your eyes, ships and small figures trading in the glare while the far shore melts into haze. He signed and dated it on the canvas. It hung among the Medici's own pictures and reached the Uffizi in 1773.