Claude Lorrain – Seaport at Sunset
Photographers and filmmakers often refer to ‘the golden hour’, the period just after sunrise or as pictured in this work, just before sunset, a time when natural light casts a particularly benign glow onto a scene. Places and people seem to enjoy a softness that they lack when the sun shines directly from overhead. When that light is diffused through the concentrated plane of the atmosphere at the horizon, the blue part of the spectrum, the ‘cooler’ end, is scattered, leaving the longer wavelength rays of orange, pink and yellow to flatter subjects with their warmth – harshness is reduced, shadows are gentler, and the backlighting of objects and figures lends them a radiance that somehow connotes happiness, an incandescence that appears almost heavenly.
Claude Lorrain was a master of the ‘golden hour’. He was also one of the first landscape artists to depict the sun quite so directly, and he did so repeatedly. His work would later inspire J.M.W Turner, a huge admirer of Claude’s, to emulate the treatment. The Barber Institute for Fine Art has a good example of this kind of portrayal in Sun Setting Through Vapour but perhaps better known is the National Gallery’s Dido Building Carthage, a work which Turner regarded as his magnum opus. Claude was working some 175 years before Turner though, and the particularity of the fiery sun clearly mesmerised the younger artist too. For both painters, the sun’s appearance represents, paradoxically, an event that is both matter-of-factly diurnal but also aesthetically timeless.
In Seaport, that sunlight also shines through a sea fret, a haze that envelops the distant buildings, lending them a mystical, even a mythical, grandeur. The location was not painted from life but is a fiction, although Claude took inspiration from classical buildings he knew well in Rome, where he worked for most of his career. The building in the left middle ground for instance, is reminiscent of the loggia structure seen in the Villa Farnesina in Rome.
Further in the distance, we can see a towering column, similar to Trajan’s which in reality lies close to the Forum but which has been transported here to the port to lend the atmosphere some added classical antiquity. The closest building on the left is given a grand porticoed entrance with supporting columns and above this a pediment complete with a one-handed clockface, according to which the time is five o’clock.
The ornateness of the built architecture together with the intense complexity of the multiple ships’ rigging all speak of human organisation, ingenuity, artistry and planning. The port, its vessels, its important buildings, its history, all encapsulate the idea of civilisation. The seas out there may be perilous and full of unknowns, but the port is a safe haven, a refuge, a place of social and economic intercourse. In short, the painting celebrates humanity’s capacity for dominion over nature. But all the while that sun shines to gesture at unfathomable distance, mystery and the eternal.
Critics of Claude have often denigrated his depiction of figures, describing them rather dismissively as ‘staffage’, deployed just to indicate scale and to add a little local colour. I think this is unfair. While the figures in Seaport might at first glance seem a little tokenistic, there is enough going on with them and in their articulation to provide real narrative interest. The people in the picture may be subordinate to sea, structures and sails but they remind us that much of life is about endeavour, relationships, occupations and the carnival of existence.
At bottom left, a musician sits on a travelling chest with his back to us, playing a tune for the young girl facing him while nearby a mother and child sit atop another chest on which a lute lies propped. Is this a little family grouping, awaiting embarkation, the father providing musical entertainment to distract from the tedium of delay? Nearby, two gentlemen, possibly merchants but both wearing swords, stand in conversation with one whose clothing suggests the orient. He may be a Turk or a Persian. One of the gentlemen doffs his hat in greeting, telling us that their encounter is courteous. By contrast, in the centre foreground, a fight is in progress. One figure lies prostrate while his opponent stands with his foot on the other while a third stands behind them, angrily gesticulating with his own hat towards another pair of better dressed figures. Of these, one holds up an appeasing hand while his companion prepares to draw his sword. A dispute is clearly in progress. Are the fighting men sailors, arguing perhaps over monies owed by the ‘gentlemen’? The two figures to the immediate right of them amidst a number of wine barrels seem to be oblivious to the kerfuffle, but not so those rowing more casks ashore on the far right. Elsewhere, small groupings of men meet one another on or in front of the steps that lead up to the grand Roman building while a party of passengers is transported from ship to shore. On the far right, we can see deckhands having climbed the rigging, dealing with sails, halyards, windlasses and the other paraphernalia particular to the lives and labours of seafarers, even while in port. All of this suggests the hustle and bustle of everyday harbour life, and onto all of which the steady sun keeps shining. The suggestion is that human life, despite all its drama, adventure and turmoil is punily insignificant compared to the magisterial constancy of day slowly turning into night with the setting of the sun.
Claude’s purpose in painting this ‘picturesque’ if imaginary port scene may not have been simply to provide an ornament to the walls of his client – some have speculated that the buyer or patron may have been French given the appearance of the fleur-de-lys emblem on the stern of one of the ships – but rather to observe the ineffable beauty of sunlight as it shines on both man’s finest achievements as well as his foolhardiness. A port is a liminal place. Ships and people will come and go from it. It can be a place where an odyssey or an exile can begin. It exists between two domains, the land inland and the sea. It is a place of both transactions and transformations; it is, in other words, a zone of endless becoming, where languages and identities mix, where transience is its essential characteristic. Against this flux, the artist conjures the amaranthine certainty of the classical world, forever bathed in the golden hour glow of the sun’s light. It (the sun) rises and falls as a beacon of constancy and stability while the relative chaos of the dock, its adrenalized tumult, ebbs and flows like the tide. Looking at the painting reminds me of that sensation we feel when viewing the earth and its human activities below, from altitude – what dramas inhere every life and how small they seem, as would our own seen from the same height.
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