Etude d'une scène de brigands [Study with Brigands]

Claude, the greatest landscape painter of his time, was also a wonderfully sensitive etcher. A series of sketches on the copper plate, this print reveals his working method. The bundles of hatched and cross-hatched marks show the artist warming up his hand. The pairs of prancing animals, probably goats, recall those in a completed etching of around the same time. The most elaborate study, at the bottom, was developed into the group of brigands in the foreground of the etching on the right. Together, these prints underscore the relationship between drawing and etching in Claude’s work and more broadly, in the seventeenth century’s approach to the technique.