It is said, and the circumstances of his early life render it probable, that he was very deficient in general acquirements. Assuredly he had no opportunities of becoming a profound scholar, nor in relation to his art was it necessary that he should; why should he have sought through the medium of books that imagery which lay before him in reality? Rome, and its environs, the banks of the Tiber, and the broad Campagna, supplied his imagination with the best food, and his pencil with inexhaustible materials. He was accustomed to spend whole days in the open air, not only studying Nature in her permanent aspects, but making memorandums of every accidental and fleeting effect which presented itself to his observation. Sandrart, who sometimes accompanied Claude in his excursions, relates that he was accustomed to discourse on the visible phenomena of nature with the intelligence of a philosopher; not only noting effects, but explaining their causes with precision and correctness, whether produced by reflection or refraction of light, by dew, vapour, or other agencies of the atmosphere. Broad as is his style, he entered minutely into detail, and made drawings of trees, shrubs, and herbage, marking all their peculiarities of shape, growth, and foliage. By this practice he was enabled to represent those objects with undeviating accuracy, and to express, by a few decided touches, their general character. Amidst the splendour of his general effects, the distinguishing qualities of objects are never neglected; fidelity is never merged in manner; and hence it is, that the longer we look at his pictures, the more vivid is the illusion, the more strongly is the reality of the represented scene impressed upon us. Combining with his fine imagination the results of observation thus long and intensely exercised, he accomplished in his works that union of poetic feeling with accurate representation of nature, which forms the highest excellence of art, and in which, as a landscape painter, he stands unrivalled.