Claude Lorrain is known as the father of European landscape painting. His influence has certainly been enormous, not only with regard to the art of his immediate followers but on European landscape painters throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The impact of his art has been felt particularly in Britain where eighteenth and early nineteenth-century artists, collectors and connoisseurs contributed to a 'Cult of Claude' which has left a lasting effect on British attitudes to the countryside. The exhibition will include all Claude's prints and about fifty drawings. There will be about a dozen paintings, chosen not only for their poetic beauty, but because they reveal some aspect of his thoughts about the nature of art. These paintings represent his work across several decades, ending with his last painting, the magical Ascanius and the Stag of Sylvia which ranks among the most important paintings in the collection of the Ashmolean