The _Dance Under the Trees_ shows Claude in his most purely pastoral vein--classic pastoral--seen through Virgilian eyes and interpreted in the spirit of the Eclogues. It is carefully composed and beautifully drawn; and if, to our more modern taste, there seems a little too obvious an “arrangement,” with the two vistas balancing one another at the right and left of the central group of trees, we must remember that landscape, no less than literature or costume, has its fashions, and that, in Claude’s time, balance and proportion were esteemed of greater value than the freedom and spontaneity which we today, more insistent on the individual note, esteem the chief charm of etching. _Le Bouvier_, etched in 1636, is accounted Claude’s masterpiece. “For technical quality of a certain delicate kind it is the finest landscape etching in the world. Its transparency and gradation have never been surpassed.”[13] It is the work of a real nature lover and true poet, and sums up in a few square inches all that is best of Claude’s art when it has shaken itself free from the “set scene” and theatricalities. Technically it is not less admirable. The copper has been caressed, so to speak, with the needle, until it responds by yielding all those elusive half lights and luminous shadows which play among the leaves of the noble trees to the left, while on the right the landscape fairly swims in light and air. For this same quality of sunlight Claude tries again and again in his etchings, in _Sunrise_ with complete success. When he essays to interpret Nature in her sterner moods, as in the _Flock in Stormy Weather_ (his one plate of the year 1651), he is far less happy. The clouds, which should be heavy with rain, are unconvincing, though the suggestion of movement in the trees is excellent, and in no other plate has he treated architecture with a firmer touch or in a more picturesque manner. [13] Etching and Etchers. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. London; Macmillan & Co. 1868. p. 178. After the middle of the seventeenth century, etching, as an original, creative art, is increasingly neglected for almost two hundred years, though it grows in popularity as an easy and expeditious mode of “forwarding” a plate to be finished with the burin. [Illustration: CLAUDE LORRAIN. LE BOUVIER Size of the original etching, 5⅛ x 7¾ inches In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston] [Illustration: CHARLES JACQUE. TROUPEAU DE PORCS Size of the original etching, 5⅛ × 8½ inches In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]