A Cluster of Buildings above a River

Although this Italianate landscape has been associated with Claude Lorrain and his name is inscribed several times on the back of the mount, it is executed in a manner that had become common in Rome by the middle of the seventeenth century, especially among French and Northern artists. Executed entirely in brush and wash, without a preliminary outline in chalk, this sheet exhibits a loosely structured approach to space. Dark trees along a riverbank in the foreground frame a view to a complex of buildings, with no less than three round towers, on the opposite bank.