Editing Claude Lorrain (section)

===Figures===
Although virtually every painting contains figures, even if only a shepherd, their weakness has always been recognised, not least by Claude himself; according to Baldinucci he joked that he charged for his landscapes, but gave the figures for free. According to Sandrart he had made considerable efforts to improve, but without success; certainly there are numerous studies, typically for groups of figures, among his drawings. It has often been thought that he handed the figures in some works over to others to paint, but it is now generally agreed that there are few such cases.  Baldinucci mentions [[Filippo Lauri]] in this context, but he was only born in 1623, and can only have taken on such work from the 1640s at best.<ref>Wine (1994), 12–14; Wine (2001), 124 (and note); Blunt, 275, n. 243</ref> The rider in the small ''Landscape with an Imaginary View of Tivoli'' in the [[Courtauld Gallery]] in London, LV 67 and dated 1642, is one of the last of his figures to wear contemporary dress.  Thereafter all of them wore "pastoral dress" or the 17th-century idea of ancient dress.<ref>Kitson, 20</ref>

In his last years his figures tend to become ever more elongated, a process taken to an extreme in his last painting, ''[[Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia]]'', of which even its owner, the [[Ashmolean Museum]], says "The hunters are impossibly elongated – Ascanius, in particular, is absurdly top-heavy".<ref>[http://www.ashmolean.org/assets/docs/Exhibitions/AshmoleanPressImagesClaudeLorrain.pdf Ashmolean Press summary] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160417112057/http://www.ashmolean.org/assets/docs/Exhibitions/AshmoleanPressImagesClaudeLorrain.pdf |date=17 April 2016 }} for ''Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape'' in 2011</ref> Its pendant ''View of Carthage with Dido and Aeneas'' (1676, [[Kunsthalle, Hamburg]]) has figures almost as extreme.  With the mid-20th fashion for medical diagnosis through art, it was suggested that Claude had developed an optical condition accounting for such effects, but this has been rejected by doctors and critics alike.