Start making your travel arrangements. One week from today will see the opening of a monographic exhibition of Claude Lorrain at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

“’Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape’ presents about one hundred and thirty works from all phases of the important French Baroque artist’s production,” according to the museum. “Based on the most recent results of scientific research, the comprehensive exhibition comprises a high-caliber selection of paintings as well as Claude Lorrain’s unique drawings and printed works. Loans were made available by the British Museum and the National Gallery in London, the Petit Palais in Paris, and the Museum of Prints and Drawings in Berlin, among others. Developed together with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the presentation highlights Lorrain as a highly reflected artist producing outstanding and original works in each of the three media.

“Claude’s works not only exercised a formative influence on England’s fine arts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like on the painter William Turner, but especially on English ornamental gardening, which mirrors the idealized landscape so typical of Lorrain – a landscape that strikes us as good as natural thanks to its most precise layout. Germany’s most famous “Grand Tourist,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, aimed at this peculiar characteristic when he described Claude’s pictures as works that possess ‘the highest truth, but no trace of reality’ and said that ‘in Claude Lorrain, nature declares itself eternal.’”

“Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape” runs from February 3 to May 6 at the Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, Frankfurt, Germany, +49(0)69-605098-0, staedelmuseum.de.

Franklin Einspruch is an artist and writer. He blogs at Artblog.net.