Claude Lorrain

Roethlisberger suggests that Claude's drawings with loosely hand-drawn framing lines might be those most likely done onsite. This sheet has several marks indicating the informal nature of the recorded observations: the soft and fluid black chalk sketch that structures the sheet; the thin and lightly applied brown wash used to construct the trees and shade the foreground, the focused plant study worked out on the verso, the abbreviated marks of the foreground foliage.
Given the artist's focus on plants in this sheet, it might be placed alongside a group of seven further studies of plants and trees which Roethlisberger dates to the second half of the 1660s, roughly twenty-five to thirty years later than the other sheets in the Animal Album, to which all eight sheets once belonged. It is particularly close to two sheets containing similar pen studies of a broad-leafed plant (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and Royal Museum of Fine Arts Copenhagen). When the dealer Hans Calmann acquired Claude's Animal Album at sale in 1957, it had purportedly been kept intact in the Odescalchi family in Rome since at least the eighteenth century. Calmann dismantled the album and sold the 64 sheets individually; this sheet was no. 62 of the album.