The superb exhibition Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum could hardly have been more timely. There has not been an exhibition devoted to Claude in the United States since the landmark 1982 retrospective at the National Gallery (H. Diane Russell, Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery, 1982). To formulate the current exhibition, Clark senior curator Richard Rand relied principally on the British Museum, which holds an unparalleled and uniquely comprehensive collection of Claude drawings. Encompassing the Richard Payne Knight collection of some three hundred nature and compositional drawings and Claude’s own Liber Veritatis (the famous graphic compilation of nearly all of his paintings after the mid 1630s), these holdings present the full range of the artist’s draftsmanship. Unlike the 1998 show at Oxford (J. J. L. Whiteley, Claude Lorrain: Drawings from the Collections of the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum, London: British Museum, 1998), Rand made the crucial decision to punctuate the exhibition with judiciously selected paintings. This had the benefit of achieving a visually stunning installation, in which related drawings are grouped around a key painting or two, and of presenting Claude’s graphic work in the context of the studio product that guided...