The Flight into Egypt

The subject is a flight from a massacre, Joseph and Mary carrying the infant Jesus out of Bethlehem ahead of Herod's soldiers, but you could easily miss the danger. Claude Lorrain, a Frenchman who had settled in Rome, sets them small in a wide, calm valley bathed in warm evening light, with shepherds and tall trees and the kind of Roman countryside he studied on long walks outside the city. In the 1630s pure landscape was still a young, low-ranked kind of painting, and Claude did more than almost anyone to make it respectable by hanging a sacred story inside it. The picture spent decades in the Clowes family collection in Indianapolis before entering the city's museum outright in 2003.