David et Goliath

1600

Born

1613–1614

To Rome with the pastry cooks; a cook for Agostino Tassi

According to Sandrart, the fourteen-year-old Claude followed a group of pastry cooks to Rome and became a household cook for the landscape painter Agostino Tassi, a pupil of Paul Bril, where he picked up some landscape techniques. Some sources put this in 1613–14, but modern scholars place his apprenticeship with Tassi at about 1622/23–1625.

c. 1622 – 1625

Apprentice to Agostino Tassi

According to Sandrart, Tassi, in whose house Claude served as a servant and cook, at some point made him an apprentice and taught him drawing and painting; his large workshop specialised in fresco schemes for palaces. Modern scholars date the apprenticeship to about 1622/23–1625.

1625–1627

Back to Lorraine: Nancy and Claude Deruet

At twenty-five Claude left Italy and made long journeys to France and Switzerland; in 1625–27 he lived in his homeland, in Nancy, and worked with Claude Deruet, court painter to the Duke of Lorraine, on the decoration of a Carmelite church. According to Baldinucci, he left Deruet’s studio comparatively soon, in 1626 or 1627.

c. 1626

Settles permanently in Rome, on the Via Margutta

By the end of 1626 Claude had settled permanently in Rome, in a house on the Via Margutta in the artists’ quarter, and spent most of his life in the city; there he joined the society of foreign artists known as the “Birds of Passage” (Bent vogels).

23 November 1682

Died