Claude (Claude Lorrain) 1604/5?–1682
NG 6471 
Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid (‘The Enchanted Castle’)

Humphrey Wine, 2001

Extracted from:
Humphrey Wine, The Seventeenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2001).

1664

Oil on canvas, 87.1 × 151.3 cm

Provenance

According to the inscription on the verso of LV 162, painted for Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna (1637–89) in 1664;¹ in the possession of the Marchese Pallavicino by 1696;² according to the second Index to the Liber Veritatis, owned by ‘Mr Davenant’;³ offered for sale, and possibly sold, by auction by ‘Mr. D’Avenant’ at an unknown date (lot 45, 46, 47 or 48);⁴ apparently sold together with its pendant, Psyche saved from drowning (Cologne, Wallraf‐Richartz Museum), by Mr Bragge, his sale, London, Prestage, 15 February 1750 (lot 71 or 72, £6 10s. and £6 6s., both to ‘Dr Chauncy’);⁵ according to Earlom’s engraving after LV 162 published in 1777, then in the collection of Nathaniel Chauncey of Castle Street, Leicester Fields, London;⁶ his posthumous sale together with its pendant, Christie’s, 27 March 1790 (lot 90 or 91, sold for 135 and 145 guineas respectively);⁷ probably sold with its pendant by the mortgagees of Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734–1802), formerly ‘Prime Minister’ of France,⁸ London, Skinner & Dyke, 28 March 1795 (lot 86, 520 guineas to Bryan);⁹ sold to Coxe by 7 June 1795 for about £700;¹⁰ probably sale of Richard Troward of Pall Mall, London, Phillips, 18 April 1807 (lot 8, 1000 guineas);¹¹ posthumous sale of Walsh Porter (d.1809) of Argyle Street, London, Christie’s, 14 April 1810 (lot 44, 900 guineas(?) to Buchanan(?));¹² bought by William Wells (1768–1847) of Redleaf Park, near Penshurst, Kent, from Buchanan for £1000 by 27 April 1810;¹³ sale of the executors of William Wells deceased, Christie & Manson, 12–13 May 1848 (lot 122, £2100 to Farrer, presumably on behalf of Lord Overstone);¹⁴ exhibited in 1851 as owned by Lord Overstone; noted by Waagen in Lord Overstone’s collection at 2 Carlton Gardens, London;¹⁵ by inheritance in 1883 to Harriet Sarah, Lady Wantage (d.1920), of Lockinge, near Wantage, Berks, and thence to A.T. Loyd;¹⁶ recorded at Lockinge in 1905,¹⁷ and on the north wall of the drawing room of Lockinge House in 1928;¹⁸ on A.T. Loyd’s death in 1944 removed from Lockinge House to Betterton House nearby;¹⁹ on long‐term loan to the National Gallery from 1974; purchased in 1981 from the trustees of Thomas Loyd through Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd with help from the NHMF and the NACF .

Exhibitions²⁰

London(?)1795, Bryan’s Gallery, Savile Row (128);²¹ London 1819, BI (4), exhibited as ‘The Enchanted Castle’ at this and all following exhibitions until 1969; London 1836, BI (23);²² London 1851, BI (18); London 1888, RA , Exhibition of Works by the Old Masters (138); London 1892, Guildhall, Descriptive Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Pictures (78);²³ London 1902, RA , Exhibition of Works by the Old Masters (67);²⁴ Paris 1925, Petit Palais, Exposition du Paysage Français de Poussin à Corot (123); London 1930, The Magnasco Society at Messrs Spink & Son, Landscape Pictures of Different Periods (8);²⁵ London 1932, RA , Exhibition of French Art 1200–1900 (162);²⁶ Oxford 1934, Ashmolean Museum, Pictures from Lockinge House, Wantage (5); Paris 1937, Palais National des Arts, Chefs d’Oeuvre de l’Art Français (75);²⁷ Birmingham 1945, City Museum and Art Gallery, Catalogue of Paintings and Tapestries from Lockinge House Wantage lent by Captain C.L. Loyd, MC (7);²⁸ London 1947, Wildenstein & Co Ltd, A Loan Exhibition of French Painting of the XVIIth Century in aid of The Merchant Navy Comforts Service (14); Birmingham 1948–9, City Museum and Art Gallery, Richard Wilson and his Circle (135); London 1949, Tate Gallery, Richard Wilson and his Circle (134); London 1949–50, RA , Landscape in French Art (27); London 1956, Thos Agnew & Sons Ltd, Summer Exhibition of Pictures by Old Masters Including a Group on Loan from the Lockinge Collection (17); Stockholm 1958, Nationalmuseum, Fem Sekler Fransk Konst (43); London 1967, Christie’s, Christie’s Bi‐Centenary Exhibition (4); London 1969, Hayward Gallery, The Art of Claude Lorrain (34), as ‘Landscape with Psyche at the Palace of Cupid’; London 1982, NG , Acquisition in Focus. Claude. The Enchanted Castle; Washington 1982–3, National Gallery of Art, Claude Lorrain 1600–1682 (45A);²⁹ 1987, London, NG , Director’s Choice. Selected Acquisitions 1973–1986 (22); London 1988–9, British Museum, Treasures for the Nation: conserving our heritage (41); Copenhagen 1992 (14); London 1994, NG , Claude. The Poetic Landscape (38); London 1995–6, British Library, John Keats (no catalogue); London 1997, Christie’s, Treasures for Everyone Saved by the National Art Collections Fund (no catalogue).

Related Works

Paintings

• (1) Rome, Pallavicini collection. Oil on canvas, 22.5 × 28 cm. According to Roethlisberger, an Italian copy of the early eighteenth century, presumably made when the original left the collection;³⁰
• (2) Whereabouts unknown. Anon. sale, Nottingham, Gaskill and Newcomb, 22 October 1811 (lot 46, £157).³¹ Presumably a copy;
• (3) Whereabouts unknown. The ‘broad free’ version in Robert Archer’s sale, Oxford, 1818(?), no. 3, and then in his sale in London, Christie’s, 7 June 1819 (lot 106, £18 7s. to Bartie);³²
• (4) Whereabouts unknown. Possibly a copy, Lord Berwick sale, London, Phillips, 6–7 June 1825, lot 159, where described as ‘Claude Lorraine… A grand beautiful Landscape. The subject Cupid and Psyche – from the Colonna Palace’;
• (5) A copy with Mrs R. Langton Douglas, near Eton, recorded in 1961;³³
• (6) Two copies in reverse are noted in Roethlisberger 1961 (p. 387). One of these could be the painting formerly in the E. Stowes Johnson collection, of 63.5 × 88.8 cm, sold at Christie’s, South Kensington, 10 May 1990, lot 213;
• (7) Earl of Wemyss, Gosford House. Apparently a late painting by Richard Wilson (1713/14–82), evidently inspired by NG 6471 or an engraving, but the figure of Psyche is omitted. Oil on canvas, 37.5 × 58 cm;³⁴[page 129][page 130]
• (8) Whereabouts unknown. A copy, oil on canvas, 108 × 144 cm. Sold Christie’s, South Kensington, 27 October 1999 (lot 100, £9200 including premium).

Drawings (by Claude)

• (1) Private collection. Inscribed at the bottom: Claud 1663. And on the reverse: Claudio Gillee dit le loraine fecit/A Roma 1666/ Mr. Gulquin. ( MRD 929);³⁵
• (2) Chantilly, Musée Condé, no. 271 bis. Inscribed at bottom right by a later hand: claudio f.^t / A.o 1660. ( MRD 930; fig. 3);
• (3) Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, no. 1983‐10. Inscribed with five deleted p’s at the bottom left, and at bottom right: p… 1663 Roma, partly cut off. Inscribed on the verso: Al Molto Ill^re e Reverendo padre sorba / il padre maestro nel humanita del / Collegio Romano, and again, Al Reverendo Padre sorba / Al Molto ill^re e Re Reverendo padro sorba padro / Al Coleigio Romano ( MRD 931).³⁶ Like Drawings (1) and (2) above, a preliminary compositional drawing;
• (4) London, British Museum, no. 166. LV 162. Inscribed on the verso: faict All^mo et excell^mo sig^re / il sig^re Contestable Colonna / A Roma 1664 / Claudio Gellee / in fecit. ( MRD 932);
• (5) Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. Inscribed on the verso: Claude Gellee fecit Roma le 2 [deleted] deuz juin / A Roma 1666 / A monsieur Gilquin ( MRD 933). Possibly done independently of NG 6471 but derived from MRD 931, the left‐hand addition of which its scenery resembles; but possibly preparatory for the painting and so earlier than the date inscribed, which may be the date of the inscription rather than that of the drawing.³⁷

Prints

• (1) In reverse by F. Vivares (1709–80) and W. Woollett, begun in 1780 by Vivares, and published 12 March 1782 as ‘The Enchanted Castle’.³⁸ Fig. 1;
• (2) by Thomas Hodges in Beauties of Claude Lorrain, London 1825, pl. 16;
• (3) by Byrne according to Smith, and so by 1837, or earlier if the reference is to William Byrne (1743–1805), as is likely, but no copy of the print has been found.³⁹

Technical Notes

There is considerable wear throughout, particularly in the rocky landscape and trees on the left, the castle, the sea, the edges of the foliage and the trunk of the large tree on the right. This tree has been heavily retouched, but there are numerous retouchings throughout. There is an old diagonal stretcher mark at top left, and feather cracking caused by a blow a few centimetres above the sun; the varnish is blotchy and discoloured, and parts of the foliage are blanched.

There has also been some flaking of the paint in the castle, leaving a darker underlayer showing. All of these defects were apparent on examination when NG 6471 was acquired in 1981 (it was said to have been partly cleaned around 1950), but further cleaning or restoration was not undertaken, since the risks involved outweighed the likely benefits. NG 6471 may also have been cleaned after its exhibition in 1851, when Waagen opined that a ‘discreet cleaning would greatly improve this picture’, and before 1857, when he published Cabinets of Art in Great Britain, where the comment is not repeated.⁴⁰

The primary support is a medium‐weave twill canvas, double‐lined. The stretcher is wood, probably nineteenth century, and may date from the possible cleaning in the 1850s. There are various exhibition labels on the stretcher, and in addition the following marks: (i) 27 in chalk; (ii) GL incised with pencil in a cursive script; and (iii) at lower left, in pencil, what looks like b or 6.

A pentimento shows that the large tree at the right was originally some 5 cm to the left of its present position.

Discussion

This painting has been popularly known as ‘The Enchanted Castle’ since publication of the Vivares/Woollett engraving in 1782 (fig. 1). As is apparent from the catalogues of the Calonne and Troward sales, held respectively in 1795 and 1809, in which NG 6471 probably figured,⁴¹ the castle in question was identified as that of Armida, the beautiful enchantress who in Torquato Tasso’s epic poem La Gerusalemme Liberata seduces the virtuous knight Rinaldo but is ultimately abandoned by him. Tasso’s poem, first published in complete form in Italian in 1581, had been published in a loose English translation by Edward Fairfax in 1600, but around 1800 the better known translation would have been that of John Hoole published in numerous editions between 1763 and 1807.⁴² In Hoole’s translation, after her abandonment by Rinaldo Armida ‘seeks not then Damascus’ regal dome,/ but shuns her once‐lov’d seats and native home;/ And guides her chariot to the fatal lands,/ Where, midst Asphaltus’ waves, her castle stands./ There from her menial train and damsel’s eyes,/ All pensive, in a lone retreat she lies;/ A war of thought her troubled breast assails;/ But soon her shame subsides, and wrath prevails.’ The popularity of the subject of Rinaldo and Armida as a subject for painting might have encouraged the identification of NG 6471 with it (although it does not explain use of the term ‘enchanted castle’ which does not appear in Hoole’s translation). However, this identification is almost certainly wrong because the two figures in the boat in the [page 131]background have no place in Tasso’s story at this point, when Rinaldo was out of sight, and, in any case, Rinaldo would have had two companions, Carlo and Ubaldo, not one, and the boat was a sailing boat. Nevertheless, identification of the pensive female figure as Armida for a period obscured recognition of her as Psyche, an identification made earlier by Baldinucci,⁴³ referred to from time to time in the nineteenth‐century literature on the painting,⁴⁴ but given due emphasis again only since the 1960s.⁴⁵ There is no reason to doubt Baldinucci, because in the first place he probably knew Claude and in the second place such an identification is consistent with the subject of the pendant now in Cologne, namely Psyche saved from drowning (fig. 4).

The story of Psyche was told by the second‐century author and philosopher Apuleius in Books IV to VI of his Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass: the beautiful Psyche, a mortal, threatened with marriage to a monster, is wafted away by the West Wind. She awakes and sees a magical palace. There she meets Cupid who becomes her lover, but makes her promise not to look upon his (divine) face. Psyche’s sisters, however, overcome with jealousy, eventually persuade her that Cupid is a monster whom she should murder while he sleeps. As Psyche gazes upon the sleeping Cupid, falling hopelessly in love with him, a drop of burning oil from her lamp wakes him. After berating her for breaking her promise, Cupid abandons the now wretched girl.

In NG 6471 Psyche is shown in a pose usually interpreted as melancholic (fig. 2). This, together with her isolation in the landscape and the cool colouring, led to the assumption that Claude was showing Psyche after her abandonment by Cupid.⁴⁶ Levey, however, argued that this was impossible because in Apuleius’ tale Psyche did not sit in contemplative melancholy following her abandonment.⁴⁷ On the contrary, she ‘lay flat upon the ground and watched her husband’s flight as far as her sight enabled her, tormenting her soul with the most piteous lamentations. But after her husband, speeding on his oarage of wings, had been removed from her view by vastness of distance she threw herself over the edge of a nearby river.’⁴⁸ Levey proposed that Claude had shown the earlier moment in the story when Psyche had been deposited outside Cupid’s palace by the West Wind – consequently before her meeting with Cupid – and further that NG 6471 was intended as a reference to the marriage in 1661 of the patron, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, to Maria Mancini, who, like Psyche, had come from the west, that is from France to Rome.⁴⁹ It is also related that Maria Mancini was unimpressed by the exterior of the Palazzo Colonna, but changed her mind when she saw the works of art and luxury within,⁵⁰ so it could be argued that Claude’s architecture alludes to the Palazzo Colonna’s interior magnificence. However, neither Psyche’s pose, which is at least contemplative if not melancholic, nor the sombre hues of the picture fit the much lighter mood of that moment in the story. For, after being wafted by the West Wind to a flowery valley, Psyche lay pleasantly reclining in the soft lawn on her bed of dew‐covered grass, her great mental distress was relieved and she fell peacefully asleep. When she had been restored by enough slumber, she arose feeling calm. She saw a grove planted with huge, tall trees; she saw a glistening spring of crystal water. At the midmost centre of the grove beside the gliding stream is a royal palace, constructed not with human hands but by divine skills [there then follows a description of the palace]… Psyche, attracted by the allurement of this beautiful place, came closer…⁵¹

There is, however, another moment in the story when Psyche is alone,⁵² namely when her two jealous sisters leave after persuading her to murder Cupid: Psyche was left alone, except that a woman driven by hostile furies is not alone. In her grief she ebbed and flowed like the billows of the sea. Although she had determined her plan and her mind was made up, nevertheless, as she turned her hands towards the act itself, she still wavered irresolutely, torn apart by the many emotions raised by her dilemma. She felt haste and procrastination, daring and fear, despair and anger; and worst of all, in the same body she loathed the beast but loved the husband.⁵³

It is tempting to see in the figure of Psyche seated by the seashore a reference to her having ‘ebbed and flowed like the billows of the sea’, and in the two figures in the rowing boat a reference to her departing sisters. This interpretation is reinforced by the likelihood of Claude having based Psyche on an illustration of the personification of Meditation in Baudouin’s Iconologie (see below). Although the rowing boat motif is common in Claude’s work, its importance in his thinking in relation to this picture is suggested by its prominence in one of [page 132] his preparatory drawings ( MRD 930; fig. 3), where the two figures are clearly rowing away from the pensive Psyche.⁵⁴ So interpreted, the pairing of NG 6471 with its pendant, Psyche saved from drowning (fig. 4), becomes more poignant – a moment of despair induced by indecision, followed by a decision (to commit suicide) induced by despair.

If the London and Cologne paintings were, by their choice of subjects, intended to refer to Colonna’s personal circumstances, it is not clear how. Although depictions of the story of Psyche and Cupid were considered appropriate to the celebration of marriage, neither the London nor the Cologne painting has a celebratory air. It seems unlikely that Claude would have alluded to the difficulties which Colonna and Mancini experienced in their initially happy marriage,⁵⁵ which was breaking down by 1665, the year before completion of the Cologne painting.⁵⁶ On the other hand it is clear that Claude consulted closely with Colonna on the Cologne picture, and so by extension on NG 6471,⁵⁷ and it is also the case that neither the London nor the Cologne painting seems to have been in Colonna’s collection in 1679.⁵⁸ If he had disposed of the pictures by then, it could have been on account of disillusion with his marriage. Any supplementary or allegorical meanings in the paintings must, however, remain a matter of conjecture, as must any allegorical interpretation based on the tradition of equating Psyche with the Soul.⁵⁹

Wilson proposed that the figure of Psyche in NG 6471 was taken from a similarly thickset Psyche in an engraving by the Master of the Die after Michiel Coxie (fig. 5),⁶⁰ and Russell that Claude knew the image of the melancholy woman (fig. 7) in Antonio Francesco Doni’s I Marmi (Venice 1552) with [page 133] accompanying text indicating that she had been abandoned and isolated.⁶¹ Another possible source would have been a then relatively recent French edition of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Les metamorphoses, ou L’asne dor. As Russell noted, in the bottom right‐hand corner of one of the engravings (fig. 6), Psyche appears seated in an attitude similar to that of Psyche in NG 6471.⁶² If this was his source, then Claude’s alteration to the position of Psyche’s left hand, and (assumed) direction of gaze, lends support to the idea, first advanced by Levey,⁶³ that the Psyche in NG 6471 was not intended to be understood as a figure of melancholy. If, however, Claude intended to show Psyche at a moment of (in) decision, as here proposed, his source may well have been the illustration of the personification of Meditation (fig. 8) in Jean Baudouin’s edition of Ripa’s Iconologia published in Paris in 1644,⁶⁴ although Claude has shown Psyche younger than the woman of mature age described by Baudouin and has dispensed with Meditation’s book and furniture. However, the description by Baudouin of Meditation’s ‘dreamlike action [being] a sign of the gravity of her thoughts’⁶⁵ seems particularly appropriate to the moment in the story after Psyche had been left by her sisters.

The architecture of the palace as originally envisaged by Claude, to judge from MRD 931 (fig. 9), was medieval and military. Some of this remains in NG 6471 but as part of a far more complex edifice with a curious covered tower, a double storey of blind arcades, and to the fore a wing of a contemporary palazzo. Although the last has been compared to Algardi’s Palazzo Doria‐Pamphilj,⁶⁶ the likeness is purely generic, the Doria‐Pamphilj building lacking, for example, the giant pilasters which give Claude’s palace such an imposing air.⁶⁷ Russell [page 134] has suggested that the round tower may be a reference, requested by Lorenzo Onofrio, to a feature of the hill town above Lake Nemi where the Colonna family had long owned a castle, since such a reference, as Kitson had earlier pointed out, appears to be included in another picture Claude painted in 1669 for Onofrio, Landscape with the Nymph Egeria mourning Numa (Naples, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte).⁶⁸ For his part Levey has suggested that the elaborate palace with its mixture of old and new may symbolise the Colonna family’s long‐standing activity as builders. Among other things, they had built in Rome in medieval times fortifications adjoining, and out of the ruins of, a giant classical temple.⁶⁹

NG 6471 arrived in England by 1723, when Henry Davenant presumably returned with it from Italy at the end of his eight‐year stay as envoy extraordinary to various ducal courts.⁷⁰ Davenant also owned the pair to NG 6471, now in Cologne, and the two paintings remained together probably until 1795, when it seems that they were sold by Calonne.⁷¹ NG 6471 exercised a considerable hold on the Romantic imagination, as is clear from the picture’s description in the catalogue of Walsh Porter’s posthumous sale of 1810.⁷² Frequently quoted is Keats’s letter of 25 March 1818 to John Hamilton Reynolds in which he writes: ‘You know, I am sure, Claude’s Enchanted Castle, and I wish you may be pleased with my remembrance of it.’ That remembrance was verse, which included the lines ‘You know the Enchanted Castle it doth stand / Upon a Rock on the border of a Lake / Nested in Trees, which all do seem to shake / From some old Magic like Urganda’s sword.’⁷³ The following year Keats may have seen the painting itself at the British Institution exhibition, rather than the engraving which had inspired his lines to Reynolds, and this in turn may have inspired the lines in his Ode to a Nightingale published in July 1819: ‘The same that oft‐times hath / Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’⁷⁴ Francis Danby (1793–1861) responded with his visually poetic Enchanted Castle–Sunset (London, Victoria and Albert Museum; fig.10) exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841, which does not, however, follow Claude’s composition nor the character of his landscape.⁷⁵ Finally, it has been suggested that the architecture in NG 6471 may have inspired Matthew Digby Wyatt’s design for the St James’s Park elevation of the former Foreign & India Offices, built in 1862–75,⁷⁶ but such similarities as there are may be only coincidental.

General References

Smith 1837, p. 282; Pattison 1884, p. 233; Roethlisberger 1961, no. 162; Roethlisberger 1975, no. 233; Kitson 1978, pp. 153–4; The National Gallery Report January 1980–December 1981, pp. 52–5; Wright 1985b, pp. 96–7.

Notes