The Ford

Claude signed this canvas in the way he usually did, along the bottom, Claudio Gellé, made in Rome, and then a year whose last digit has worn away. The museum reads it as around 1644. He had reason to sign. By the 1640s his landscapes were being copied and passed off in Rome, and he had begun keeping a book of drawings, the Liber Veritatis, recording every picture he sent out so that a buyer could check a doubtful one against it. This composition is in that book, and it goes back to an etching he made in 1636. The painting is small for him, 68 by 99 centimetres, and has no saint and no myth in it. Cattle wade a river past a ruined portico, a herdsman sits on the near bank, and a boat and an arched bridge lie back in the haze. It came into the Spanish royal collection under Philip V, and a 1746 inventory at La Granja lists it with a companion piece showing a river and two buildings. That one had gone by 1818.