HOW The
intended.
many
imitators,
TO STUDY PICTURES story is that his popularity produced and that he adopted this means to es-
tabhsh his proprietorship of the subject in each case. But the more probable theory regards these sketches as a record which the artist made in a general way of his work. He collected them into a volume, which,^ known as the Liber Veritatis, has been for more than a hundred years in the possession of the Dukes of Westminster. It was in rivalry of this book that the English painter, Turner, as we shall find, produced his book of drawings, which he called Liber Studiorum. Claude, hke that other French artist, Nicolas Poussin, who was seven years his senior, to belonged Italy rather than to France. Both introduced something new into the field of subject. Like Poussin, also, Claude conceived the idea of giving ideal or heroic beauty to the landscape, that
which
it
might correspond
his figures were further in the direction
to the heroic incidents in
engaged. But he went a step of pure landscape; his
making
figures of comparatively little importance, and concentrating his effort upon the ideal or heroic character of the landscape, into which also he incorporated the was a close student of nabeauty of architecture.
He
ture, sketched and painted in the open
air,
and, like his
Dutch contemporary Cuyp, filled his skies with the appearance of real sunshine. But the use that he made of nature was unnatural. Instead of being satisfied to paint it as it is, for its own sake, as Hobbema was, he felt, like Poussin, that the province of art was to improve upon it. So Poussin, more particularly through his figures, and Claude, through [
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