In the pantheon of landscape artists, it is Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600-82) who are held up as the perfect exemplars. These two Frenchmen, who spent much of their careers in Rome, perfected the classical landscape, in which mythological, allegorical or biblical themes played out in the soft light and endless vistas of the Italian countryside. Between them, they were largely responsible for raising the status of landscape painting from a lowly genre to one capable of nobility, and their influence on succeeding generations of artists (and poets and landscape gardeners) was profound. Before them, however, came another foreigner who helped shape them into the painters they became.
As The Works of Eminent Masters in Painting, Sculpture… put it in 1854, “to prepare for the coming of a Claude, or a Poussin, many generations of artists had to toil, if we may so speak, at the foot of the pedestal on which they were to mount”, and the most important of those toilers was Paul Bril.
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