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Mountain Landscape with Lightning, c1675, by Francisque Millet
This vertiginous Alpine view riven by a jagged streak of fire in the sky was painted in the age when French artists raised landscape to a new status as a serious and poetic artistic genre. Millet, who was based in Paris, shares the grandeur of his contemporaries Claude and Poussin. But we tend to picture their landscapes as calm and still, tinted with Mediterranean light â in short, âclassicalâ. That moderate atmosphere digusted the Victorian critic John Ruskin, who contrasted such milquetoast stuff with the British romanticism of Turner. Here, however, Millet creates an electrifying storm erupting from a calm day, its gold light and black clouds searing against the cool Alps: a scintillating bolt from the blue.