Before going down to the National Gallery's Corot to Monet: A Fresh Look at Landscape from the Collection (until 20 September), it is worth first going upstairs to take in the evening light of Claude Lorrain's images of a golden age and the ordered recession from tree to temple in Nicolas Poussin's Virgilian pastorals. The exhibition down below chronicles a flirtation with rough and inharmonious reality that would eventually challenge the compact those older painters made between art and beauty. To create the latter was their highest aim, and although the definition of beauty could take in new categories from time to time - the terrible, the sublime - a degree of poetry, an intimation of grandeur, was a necessary part of it.

LRB 27 August 2009 | PDF Download