making this French painter one of the most widely beloved artists of the Baroque. Building on the base of the ideal landscape created by his predecessors and contemporaries, particularly early Italian Baroque painter Annibale Carracci, fellow French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin and Paul Bril, Claude Lorrain was perhaps the most influential landscape painter in the history of art and paved the way for generations of landscape painters to come.

Claude had some immediate followers in Italy and France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries (most notably his pupil, Angeluccio, Salvatore Rosa, and Claude Joseph Vernet), but Claude's greatest influence was felt in England. Claude's paintings impacted all aspects of English culture, from literature to garden design, and English artists were by no means immune to this influence. Claude's most important English disciples include the phenomenal Romantic artists J. M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Samuel Palmer.