The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba

The Queen of Sheba is here, gathering her retinue on the quay to sail off and visit King Solomon, but she is tiny, and that is the point. Claude Lorrain worked in Rome, and by 1648 he was Europe's most sought-after painter of harbours at the exact moment the sun clears the horizon. The real subject is that low light, laid in a golden path straight down the water toward you, with palaces and a ship's rigging thrown into silhouette against it. A French general in the papal army ordered the picture. Nearly two centuries later the English painter Turner loved Claude's seaports so fiercely that he left two of his own canvases to London on one condition, that they hang forever beside this one. In the National Gallery they still do.