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Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain (1600–1682)
Studies of Deer
Point of brush and brown ink and brown and gray wash, heightened with white (partly oxidized), on paper
8 1/8 x 8 inches (205 x 203 mm)
Signed and inscribed at lower right in pen and brown ink, Claudio fecit / in bourghese
Purchased on the Lois and Walter C. Baker Fund and the Edwin H. Herzog Fund and as the gift of Salle and James M. Vaughn, Jr.; 2004.31
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This drawing was previously the first page in what Marcel Roethlisberger has called "The Animal Album," a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century binding containing 64 sheets of studies by Claude pasted to its pages. The majority of the studies were of animals, which Roethlisberger dates to the 1630s and ’40s, the period in which Claude made most of his nature drawings. This page is the only one that is signed, and the inscription identifies the location as the park of the Villa Borghese, Rome, which was renowned from the early seventeenth century for its deer. Studies of Deer is the largest of the sheets from the Animal Album. Its peculiar freshness and immediacy look forward to the studies of François Desportes, who accompanied Louis XIV on his hunting expeditions and painted in oil on paper en plein air studies of dogs and wildlife as well as trees and bushes.

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