After the recent late blast of red hot summer, the colours at Rousham Park in north Oxfordshire were turning to autumn. Temples and classical statuary in valleys and glades, artfully placed to catch the eye, arched bridge gracing the river, Long-Horn cattle grazing the park; the miniaturised Claudian landscapes created at Rousham by 18th-century landscape gardener William Kent still readily evoked the pastoral paintings of Claude Lorrain.

The only thing missing from my imagined Claude painting was a group of classical or Biblical figures in the foreground, a shepherd or shepherdess or herd of goats, or some such motif familiar from the paintings of Claude Gellée (c.1600–1682), or Claude Lorrain as he is better known, after his birthplace.

Missing too, you could say, was the warm glow of evening light — Claude’s paintings are ever bathed in a tranquil light, warm or cool — his treatment of light was masterly. Living in Rome most of his life, he roamed the rolling country of the Tiber Valley and Campagna gathering a stock of motifs — ancient ruins, rivers, trees, hills, animals, figures — all methodically saved to use and reuse like ‘building blocks’ in assembling his compositions.

Many English parks — Rousham, Blenheim, Stourhead among them — were inspired by this Frenchman living in Italy. Britain was obsessed with Claude, Germany too. A ‘cult of Claude’ grew as 18th- and 19th- century British ‘Grand Tourists’ came home armed with his paintings and nostalgia to recreate the poetic beauty of a Claudian landscape in an English estate.

Greatly admired by contemporaries and inspirational to artists and poets for centuries — Constable regarded Claude as “the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw” — in time his idealism fell out of fashion. To a 19th-century world waking up to Pre-Raphaelitism and Impressionism his Arcadian paintings looked ‘artificial’.

The Ashmolean in partnership with the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, hopes to set that right. “Claude’s art is recognisable to almost all of us, even if we are less familiar with his name, and this important exhibition will reintroduce us to one of the greatest painters of all time,” said exhibition curator Dr Jon Whiteley.

With this major exhibition in Oxford of 140 works from international collections, we have an unprecedented opportunity on our doorstep. Exquisite drawings, often variations on themes, often highly finished — he was a most accomplished draughtsman — and 13 oil paintings, several reunited with their original pendants (Claude was the first to specialise in painting ‘pairs’). For one, the Ashmolean’s great Ascanius and the Stag of Silvia (1682), his very last painting, is shown beside its companion made five years before, Aeneas’s Farewell to Dido in Carthage (1676).

Then, a lesser-known side to Claude: his printmaking. In the largest exhibition of his etchings ever held, almost his entire output as a printer, here is his extraordinary Fireworks Series recording in sequence the thrill of wine-spouting fountains, exploding towers, and fireworks in a week-long Baroque Roman party.

At the Ashmolean until January 8. Too good to miss — the last major Claude show was more than ten years ago and did not include these surprising etchings. For more information see www.ashmolean.org.