Aeneas on Delos

Two large trees dominate a grand landscape. Majestic, Classical buildings stand to the left. The sea is in the distance. A small group of people to the left of the foreground can barely be seen, although they are actually the subject of the drawing. Claude Lorrain has depicted a scene from classical literature, a fragment from Virgil's 'Aeneid': the hero Aeneas (the man in armour), his father and his son are guests of the king of the Greek island of Delos. Claude Lorrain, one of the principal landscape artists of the seventeenth century, made this drawing as a study for a painting. Lorrain did not work out the details. His intention here was to record the landscape.