A young couple with two goats (recto); A nude male torso seen from behind (verso)

The figures on the recto relate to the foreground of Claude's pastoral landscape painted in 1644 for Michel Passart and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble (M. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings, New York, 1979, no. 79, ill.). Until 1957, the sheet was once part of the so-called Animal Album, and appears to be unique among the group for its direct conection with a picture. The figures by Claude consequently appear in his ricordo of the picture in the Liber Veritatis (pl. 79): between 1646 and 1666, partly in an effort to defend the integrity of his increasingly popular work from forgers, Claude began making elaborately finished drawings to record his finished canvases which he had bound into a book, his Liber Veritatis. Each ricordo was inscribed on the verso with the date that the painting was completed and the name of the patron who commissioned it. As noted by Roethlisberger, the verso of the present sheet contains one of Claude's rare academic nudes drawn from life.