Nicolas Poussin

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(b Les Andelys, Normandy, June 1594; d Rome, 19 Nov 1665). French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response, transcending any single moment in a narrative sequence but communicating and crystallizing every underlying passion into a comprehensive image.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), one of the greatest French painters, rationally synthesized the diverse tendencies of French and Italian art. His work is a salient example of lucid control by the mind over the senses.

The art of Nicolas Poussin is a visual record of progression from the chaos of youth to self-awareness, from self-control to intellectualism, and from wisdom to harmony. In the 19th century Paul Cézanne conferred the ultimate tribute: "Every time I come away from Poussin I know better who I am."

Poussin was born in the hamlet of Villers near Les Andelys, Normandy, in June 1594. His father, who had certain claims to ancient but minor nobility, came from Soissons; he was a military man turned farmer. His mother was the widow of a lawyer, and Nicolas was destined for the law. The boy, who knew Latin from childhood, received a sound education until he was 18. His proclivity for art provoked the disapproval of his parents, and in 1612 the presence of Quentin Varin, a minor mannerist painter, in the neighborhood occasioned Poussin's flight from home.

After a brief sojourn with the painter Noël Jouvenet in Rouen, Poussin went to Paris, where the patronage of a young nobleman from Poitou enabled him to frequent the studios of the portraitist Ferdinand Elle and the mannerist painter Georges Lallemand. About 1614 his noble friend took Poussin home to his château in Poitou, but his patron's mother did not like the alliance, and the artist departed on foot, reaching Paris exhausted and ill from malnutrition. After a year's rest with his family at Les Andelys, Poussin returned to Paris to begin a productive career.

Except for a trip to Florence about 1620-1621 and another to Lyons shortly thereafter, Poussin spent the years between about 1616 and 1624 establishing his position in Paris. He studied architecture, perspective, and anatomy; the mannerist frescoes of Francesco Primaticcio at Fontainebleau; antique sculpture; and the High Renaissance paintings of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian and the engravings of Giulio Romano. He frequented intellectual and artistic circles and met the Italian poet Giambattista Marino, for whom he executed a series known as the Massimi drawings. Poussin received commissions from the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris and Notre Dame in Paris. When he left for Rome in 1624, he was a mature artist. On the way he stopped in Venice, where the works of Titian and Paolo Veronese profoundly influenced him.

Works, 1624-1630

Between 1624 and 1630 Poussin's life was characterized by professional vicissitudes and artistic experimentation. He vacillated, though always brilliantly, between his Paris style, based upon the study of Giulio Romano and antique sarcophagi (Victory of Moses, 1624-1626), the current Roman baroque style of Pietro da Cortona (Madonna del Pilar), the Venetian High Renaissance style of Veronese (Marriage of St. Catherine) and Titian (The Inspiration of the Poet), and the realistic style of Caravaggio (Massacre of the Innocents). The conspicuous success of this period was the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus (1628-1629) for an altar in St. Peter's.

In spite of the patronage of the Barberini family, the confusion resulting from Poussin seeking his own style among the multiple possibilities afforded him in Rome and the fierce competition of Italian, Flemish, and French artists resulted in another illness. After being nursed back to health in the house of the French pastry cook Jacques Dughet, he married the daughter Anne Marie in 1630. Poussin decided to abandon the field of official commissions, and from then on he devoted himself exclusively to the execution of small cabinet pictures, fastidious in workmanship, for a private and cultivated clientele.

Works, 1630-1640

In the 1630s friendship with Cassiano dal Pozzo, amateur of the antique, led Poussin into a milieu of modest but genuine scholars. At this time his concern was poetical, focused upon the dramatic themes of Tasso (Rinaldo and Armida) and the melancholy of Ovid (Arcadian Shepherds). Between 1633 and 1637 his subject matter shifted to the pageantry of the Old Testament (Adoration of the Magi), mythology (Bacchanals for Cardinal Richelieu, and ancient history (Rape of the Sabines, two versions). During this time the coloristic fluidity of Titian, which had characterized Poussin's previous period, gave way to a statuesque plasticity of figure style, recalling Raphael's Mass of Bolsena. Compositions were oriented parallel to the picture plane and delineated by a controlled, linear perspective.

Between 1637 and 1640 this rational tendency increased. Poussin used various pictorial methods of painting to elicit a specific response in the educated observer, trained to understand his expressive purpose in any given work. These were the ancient Greek and Roman modes. His earlier works had been mainly in the Hypolydian mode for joyful subjects of divine glory and paradise and the lonic mode for festive, bacchanalian subject matter. Now they became more austere, in the Dorian mode for stable, grave, and severe themes (The Israelites Collecting Manna); or martial, in the Phrygian mode for intense and violent themes. Poussin's fondness for the modes was motivated, according to his letter of Nov. 24, 1647, to P. F. de Chantelou, by a desire for didactic clarity in communication. For the sake of readability his compositions, from the late 1630s, were cautiously planned, the figures sculpturally modeled, the tones restricted to primary colors insistently repeated, and the psychological content underlined by emphatic, sometimes histrionic gesture and facial expression.

Return to Paris, 1640-1642

Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu had been urging Poussin's return to Paris since 1638, and in 1640 he did so. He was given the title of first painter to the king, a yearly pension, and lodging in a pavilion of the Tuileries Palace. His princely reception provoked the resentment of the artistic coterie. The official circle expected him to create a French "style" and be able to direct teams of artists and artisans. But Poussin was used to a contemplative atmosphere and to concentrating on a single, meticulously executed work, and the constant demand for adaptability and glib fluency in the creation of altarpieces, decorative ceilings, and designs for books, tapestries, and furniture was exhausting. Of his many Paris works the best products of that unhappy sojourn were the decorative schemes for the ceilings of the Orangerie in the Luxembourg Palace and for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre.

Mature Period, 1643-1653

In September 1642 Poussin returned to Rome, ostensibly to fetch his wife; Richelieu and Louis XIII died soon after Poussin reached Rome, enabling him to remain in his adopted country permanently. He passed the rest of his life modestly and placidly in his house in the Via Paolina, refusing countless honors, including the directorship of the Academy of St. Luke. The most important fruit of his Paris visit was a patronage truly worthy of his talents. Intellectual conservatives of the French upper bourgeoisie, like Chantelou, called forth, through their commissions, the best of the artist's talents, the embodiment of the French classical ideal.

Between 1643 and 1653 Poussin came to grips with the fundamental premise of his creative being, the triumph of human will over the passions, manifest in his works in the domination of intellect over emotion. The Holy Family on the Steps (1648), for example, reveals his rational procedure for achieving biblical truth. The observer is infallibly guided, through the selective simplicity and lucid formality of the essential compositional elements, to the climax of the representation, the enthronement of a nobly modest family on monumental stairs, and to the denouement, the movement of the Holy Family toward the observer.

In executing his works Poussin proceeded in the following manner. After a thorough reading of the primary sources, he made a preliminary sketch; he then constructed a small model stage upon which he could move, like chessmen, actual miniature figures made of wax. After making further drawings and altering the positions of the figures as he progressed, he made larger models. From these he painted the final scene, referring occasionally to living models to avoid sterility. Thus, by steady, almost pedestrian degrees the potentially dramatic theme was simplified to a lofty understatement. Such laborious procedures, dangerously susceptible to stereotyping by imitators, were adopted until 1690 for teaching purposes by Charles Le Brun in the Paris academic program; they also explain the objection, among even cultivated critics, to Poussin's not infrequent statuesque sterility and coloristic coldness in the works of his mature period.

Late Period, 1653-1665

In Poussin's late period he moved beyond the somewhat self-conscious and mechanical means just described. The triumph of human will over the passions, or intellect over emotion, became an ultimate statement of the reign of universal harmony over the seeming chaos of nature and human life. This final conviction is most telling in such works as Apollo and Daphne (1664), sometimes called his spiritual testament to the world, and Summer and Autumn, two of the cycle of the four seasons (1660-1664). Figures are set in wildly animated landscapes of fertility or desolation, forms are reduced to nearly cubistic abstraction, and action is drastically simplified. Poussin died in Rome on Nov. 19, 1665.

Further Reading

A great deal has been written about Poussin. By far the most reliable works in English are Anthony Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue (1966) and Nicolas Poussin (2 vols., 1967), and Walter Friedlaender, Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (1966).

Additional Sources

Blunt, Anthony, Nicolas Poussin, London: Pallas Athene, 1995. Nicolas Poussin, New York: Abbeville Press, 1990.

Poussin, Nicolas (1594-1665). The most influential of all French artists. He met the Italian poet Marini at the French court, and illustrated Ovid's Metamorphoses for him before moving to Rome. He became known as a reflective thinker, with high intellectual abilities and a wide range of literary knowledge. His friends were literati like Casiano dal Pozzo, librarian to the Barberini. Poussin contributed drawings of antique sculptures to his Museo Cartacheo. He painted elegiac scenes from Ovid, Virgil, and Tasso, and embodied the concept of ‘ut pictura poesis’ in the 1630s in Rome.

In addition to many subjects from the Old and New Testaments, he painted heroic and stoic themes, like those featured by Corneille or derived from Montaigne, for French intellectuals. He also executed important allegorical commissions for Cardinal Richelieu, exploring Tasso's theories of instructing by means of pleasing through veiled meanings. This idea was popular in both poetry and painting. Poussin visited France in 1640-1 at the behest of the king and painted the Finding of Moses for Jean Pointel. The second set of Seven Sacraments for Fréart de Chantelou focused attention on the notion of the modes in painting—an intellectual system paralleling that common in music. His superb late landscapes The Seasons reinterpret crucial episodes in the Old Testament, and his late scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses introduce power and terror into the landscapist's repertoire. These sublime themes were taken up by Salvator Rosa and Poussin's brother-in-law Gaspard Poussin (Dughet). It was the reasoned commitment to clarity and appropriateness in Poussin's subject painting which influenced the next two centuries of Academic painting.

[Patsy Campbell]

Poussin, Nicolas (1594–1665), French painter. Poussin is one of the artists most beloved by art historians because his slow but steadily developing talent, combined with his passion for historical accuracy and his reflections concerning the nature and practice of the art of painting that have been extracted from his letters and the comments of others produced profound and beautiful works that rapidly became models for those who followed. Giovanni Pietro Bellori (c. 1615–1696), the esteemed Roman biographer of seventeenth-century Italian painters who thought so highly of Poussin that he (exceptionally) included a study of his life among the Italians, noted that ". . . his words were very serious, and were listened to attentively; he often talked about art, and with such great knowledge that not only painters, but everyone with a cultivated spirit came to learn from his lips the highest meanings of painting. . . ."

Poussin was convinced that he wanted to study painting when Quentin Varin visited his native Les Andelys in 1612. He trained with Georges Lallemant in Paris, and during the early 1620s began his first journey to Rome—a trip that was aborted due to ill health after Poussin reached Florence. He made a second and successful attempt via Venice in the spring of 1624 in the company of the poet Giambattista Marino, who was returning to Italy after a visit to the French capital. Upon their arrival in Rome, Marino introduced Poussin to Cardinal Francesco Barberini and his circle. Poussin soon received a commission from one of the cardinal's most distinguished retainers, the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo, to make drawings after the antique for his celebrated Museo Cartaceo ("Paper Museum"). Cassiano could not have found a better candidate for the task, for investigation of this type of ancient detail would remain important to Poussin throughout his career. Except for a return to Paris for two years (1640–1642), forced upon him by Louis XIII of France and his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, Poussin, like his countryman Claude Lorrain, remained in the Eternal City for the rest of his life.

Poussin established his reputation in Rome with his splendid Death of Germanicus painted for Barberini in 1627 and delivered in January of 1628 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), in which the figures are arranged in a frieze-like pattern across the canvas around the draped bed of the dying hero in a spartan, but palatial, interior. By their gestures and expressions it is clear that each of the protagonists is either overwhelmed with grief, overcome with shock, or angrily proclaiming his forthcoming revenge. The historically researched costumes saturated with blues, reds, and yellows reflect the artist's early attachment to Venetian coloring. The enormous success of this canvas led to the distinction of Poussin's receipt of a papal commission for St. Peter's, for which he painted his magnificent Martyrdom of St. Erasmus of 1629 (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome). After losing the commission to decorate a chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, the French church in Rome, Poussin abandoned his ambitions to paint grand decorations and turned instead to smaller cabinet pictures, which he continued to produce for a limited number of amateurs in Rome and abroad for the rest of his career.

Later Life and Influence

During the 1630s, influenced by an interest in Stoicism, Poussin became increasingly attached to an ascetic way of life and a rigorously disciplined, central Italian approach to art and art theory. These tendencies reveal themselves in his work, where, eschewing the attraction of north Italianate colore evident in varying degrees in his earlier Italian works, he turned to a more sober and refined form of classicism that became increasingly distilled and cerebral throughout his maturity. This can be seen at its best in his series of bacchanals commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu (London and Kansas City, Mo.), a series of Seven Sacraments commissioned by Cassiano (Washington, D.C., and Belvoir Castle, Leicester), and in the static and imposing Miracle of St. Francis Xavier of 1641 commissioned by François Sublet de Noyers, Surintendant des batiments du roi, for the main altar of the new novitiate of the Jesuits in Paris (Musée du Louvre).

In order to construct his progressively classical compositions in the 1640s, Poussin relied heavily on his skills as a draftsman. As the renowned Poussin scholar Anthony Blunt has noted, Poussin's drawing developed consistently, gaining in expressive power what it lost in elegance and culminating in an elliptical manner appropriate to the poetic and philosophic tone of his later works. Poussin's Moses and the Daughters of Jethro of c. 1647 (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University), the final design in a series of studies executed over more than a decade for a lost painting, provides a perfect example of how his exacting and protracted process generated compositions that accentuated the salient didactic elements of a theme with a masterful economy of means. Here, in another frieze-like design, is a counterbalance between the columnar females on the left and the men in the disarray of battle on the right, underscored by the solid architecture on the left and the violent sky and terrain on the right. The careful juxtaposition of wash and blank portions of the sheet to construct their volumes reveals the results of the artist's continued use of props on a miniature stage of his own construction for the study of physical expression, as well as light and shade. The gestures of the figures not only link the two groups and allow the viewer to read the action across the sheet, they also heighten the integrity of the scene by moving into the third dimension as each of these motions is echoed visually in the planes of the undulating landscape beyond.

Subjects like Poussin's Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs of Nysa and the Death of Echo and Narcissus of 1657 (Fogg Art Museum), commissioned by his close friend, the painter Jacques Stella—a conflation of stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Philostratus' Imagines, and later studies of these texts in a dense allegory that contrasts fertility and sterility—suggest his study of antique literature. Poussin's late landscapes, such as Autumn from the series Four Seasons of c. 1662 (Musée du Louvre) demonstrate his significant contribution to the classical mode of this genre. Although he clearly benefited from the study of the elements of landscape in the Roman countryside with Claude and others earlier in his career, the disciplined structure of Poussin's stoic vision of nature is markedly different from the sumptuous, pastoral, and idyllic classicism of his fellow expatriate.

The significance of Poussin's processes and achievements are such that it is possible to argue that he became the most influential French painter in history. His name is, indeed, synonymous with French classicism. His art and theories formed the doctrinal foundation of the new Académie, which he declined the offer to direct, and artists from Charles Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been compelled to confront his works and thoughts in order to produce a response of their own.

Bibliography

Blunt, Anthony. The Drawings of Poussin. New Haven and London, 1979.

——. Nicolas Poussin. 2 vols. Bollingen series: 35. Washington, D.C., 1967.

——. The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue. 2 vols. London, 1966.

Bonfait, Olivier, and Jean-Claude Boyer. Intorno a Poussin: Ideale classico e epopea barocca tra Parigi e Roma. Exh. cat. Rome, 2000.

Chastel, André, ed. Nicolas Poussin. 2 vols. Paris, 1960.

Chomer, Gilles, et al. Autour de Poussin. Exh. cat. Paris, 1994.

Cropper, Elizabeth, and Charles Dempsey. Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting. Princeton, 1996.

Fumaroli, Marc. L'inspiration du poète de Poussin: Essai sur l'allégorie du Parnasse. Exh. cat. Paris, 1989.

Lagerlöf, Margaretha Rossholm. Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. New Haven and London, 1990.

Mahon, Denis. "Poussiniana: Afterthoughts Arising from the Exhibition." Gazette des beaux-arts 1962 (special issue): 1–138.

Mérot, Alain. Nicolas Poussin. New York, 1990.

Rosenberg, Pierre, and Louis-Antoine Prat. Nicolas Poussin, 1594–1665. Paris, 1994.

——. Nicolas Poussin, 1594–1665: Catalogue raisonné des dessins. Milan, 1994.

Thuillier, Jacques. Nicolas Poussin. Paris, 1994.

——. Poussin before Rome. Exh. cat. London, 1995.

Verdi, Richard. Cézanne and Poussin: The Classical Vision of Landscape. Exh. cat. London, 1990.

Wright, Christopher. Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné. London, 1984.

—ALVIN L. CLARK, JR.

"Poussin" redirects here. For other uses, see Poussin (disambiguation).

Self-Portrait by Nicolas Poussin, 1650, oil on canvas, 98 x 74 cm, Louvre

Nicolas Poussin (15 June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained the dominant inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David and Paul Cézanne.

He spent most of his working life in Rome, except for a short period when Cardinal Richelieu ordered him back to France to serve as First Painter to the King.

Contents 1 Early career 2 Early years in Rome 3 Poussin in France 4 Works 5 Legacy 6 Gallery 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 9.1 Exhibitions 10 External links

Early career

Helios and Phaeton with Saturn and the Four Seasons (c. 1635)

Nicolas Poussin's early biographer was his friend Giovanni Pietro Bellori,^[1] who relates that Poussin was born near Les Andelys in Normandy and that he received an education that included some Latin, which would stand him in good stead. Early sketches attracted the notice of Quentin Varin, a local painter, whose pupil Poussin became, until he ran away to Paris at the age of eighteen. There he entered the studios of the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle and then of Georges Lallemand, both minor masters now remembered for having tutored Poussin. He found French art in a stage of transition: the old apprenticeship system was disturbed, and the academic training destined to supplant it was not yet established by Simon Vouet; but having met Courtois the mathematician, Poussin was fired by the study of his collection of engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi after Italian masters.

Rape of the Sabine Women, Rome, 1637-38, oil on canvas, 159 x 206 cm, Louvre

After two abortive attempts to reach Rome, he fell in with Giambattista Marino, the court poet to Marie de Medici, at Lyon. Marino employed him on illustrations to his poem Adone (untraced) and on a series of illustrations for a projected edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses^[2], took him into his household, and in 1624 enabled Poussin (who had been detained by commissions in Lyon and Paris) to rejoin him at Rome. It has been suggested that it was this early friendship with Marino, and the commissioning of illustrations of his poetry (which drew on Ovidian themes), that founded, or at least reinforced, the prominent eroticism in Poussin's early work.^[3]

Early years in Rome

Poussin was thirty when he arrived in Rome. At first he lodged with Simon Vouet.^[4] Through Marino, he had been introduced to Marcello Sacchetti who in turn introduced him to another of his early patrons, Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Financial difficulties arose with the departure to Spain of Barberini, accompanied by Cassiano dal Pozzo, the antiquarian and the Cardinal's secretary, who later would become a great friend and patron. However, their return from Spain in 1626 stabilized Poussin’s position, with renewed patronage by the Barberini and their circle. Two major commissions at this period resulted in Poussin's early masterwork, the Barberini Death of Germanicus (1628), partly inspired by the reliefs of the Meleager sarcophagus,^[5] and the commission for St. Peter's that amounted to a public debut, the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus (1629, Vatican Pinacoteca), indebted to designs on the same subject by the contemporary Baroque painter, Pietro da Cortona.^[6] He fell ill at this time and was taken into the house of his compatriot Jacques Dughet, where he was nursed by Dughet’s daughter, Anna Maria, who Poussin married in 1630. His two brothers-in-law were artists and Gaspard Dughet later took Poussin’s surname.^[7]

Poussin's Tancred and Erminia (early 1630s, oil on canvas, 98.5 x 146.5 cm, Hermitage Museum) shows an evolution from Poussin's early emulation of Caravaggio to a return to classicism.

During the late 1620s and 1630s, he had the opportunity to experiment and formulate his own stance in painting with reference to others which he did through study of the Antique and works such as Titian’s Bacchanals at the Casino Ludovisi and the paintings of Domenichino and Guido Reni.^[8] At the same time, the Roman Baroque was emerging: in the 1620s Cortona was producing his early Baroque paintings for the Sacchetti family; Bernini, having established his reputation in sculpture, was designing the great bronze baldachin in St. Peter’s; and an ingenious architectural imagination was emerging in works by Borromini.

Poussin became acquainted with other artists in Rome and tended to befriend those with classicizing artistic leanings: the French sculptor François Duquesnoy who he lodged with in 1626; the French artist Jacques Stella; Claude Lorraine; Domenichino; Andrea Sacchi; and joined an informal academy of artists and patrons opposed to the current Baroque style that formed around Joachim von Sandrart.

At the time the papacy was Rome’s foremost patron of the arts. Poussin’s Martyrdom of St. Erasmus for St. Peter’s was Poussin’s only papal commission, secured for him by Cardinal Barberini, the papal nephew, and Poussin was not asked again to contribute major altarpieces or paint large scale decorations for a pope.^[9] His subsequent career depended on private patronage. Apart from Cardinal Francesco Barberini, his first patrons included Cardinal Aluigi Omodei, for whom he produced the Triumphs of Flora (c 1630–32, Louvre); Cardinal de Richelieu, who commissioned various Bacchanals; Vincenzo Giustiniani, for whom he painted the Massacre of the Innocents (uncertain early date, Museé Condé, Chantilly)^[10]; Cassiano dal Pozzo who became the owner of the first series of the Seven Sacraments (late 1630s, Belvoir Castle); and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, with whom Poussin, at the call of Sublet de Noyers, returned to France in 1640.

Poussin in France

Louis XIII conferred on him the title of First Painter in Ordinary. In two years at Paris he produced several pictures for the royal chapels (the Last Supper, painted for Versailles, now in the Louvre), eight cartoons for the Gobelins tapestry manufactory, the series of the Labors of Hercules for the Louvre, the Triumph of Truth for Cardinal Richelieu (Louvre), and much minor work.

In 1643, disgusted by the intrigues of Simon Vouet, Fouquières and the architect Jacques Lemercier, Poussin withdrew to Rome. There, in 1648, he finished for de Chantelou the second series of the Seven Sacraments (Bridgewater Gallery), and also his noble Landscape with Diogenes (Louvre). This painting shows the philosopher discarding his last worldly possession, his cup, after watching a man drink water by cupping his hands.^[11] In 1649 he painted the Vision of St Paul (Louvre) for the comic poet Paul Scarron, and in 1651 the Holy Family (Louvre) for the duc de Créquy. Year by year he continued to produce an enormous variety of works, many of which are included in the list given by Félibien.

He suffered from declining health after 1650, and was troubled by a worsening tremor in his hand, evidence of which is apparent in his late drawings.^[12] He died in Rome on 19 November 1665 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, his wife having predeceased him. Chateaubriand in 1820 donated the monument to Poussin.

Poussin left no children, but he adopted as his son Gaspard Dughet (Gasparo Duche), his wife's brother, who became a painter and took the name of Poussin.

Works

Et in Arcadia ego (Les Bergers d’Arcadie), late 1630s, oil on canvas, 85 x 121 cm, Louvre

Throughout his life Poussin stood apart from the popular tendency toward the decorative in French art of his time. In Poussin's works a survival of the impulses of the Renaissance is coupled with conscious reference to the art of classical antiquity as the standard of excellence. His goal was clarity of expression achieved by disegno or ‘nobility of design’ in preference to colore or color. Perhaps his concern with disegno can best be seen in the line engraved copies of his works; among the many who reproduced his paintings, some of the most successful are Audran, Claudine Stella, Picart and Pesne.

Themes of tragedy and death are prevalent in Poussin's work.^[13] Et in Arcadia ego, a subject he painted twice (second version is seen at right), exemplifies his cerebral approach. In this composition, idealized shepherds examine a tomb inscribed with the title phrase, which is usually interpreted as a memento mori: "Even in Arcadia I exist", as if spoken by personified Death. Poussin intended his figures to "display the most distilled and most typical attitude and emotion for the role they were playing", but he was concerned with emotion "in a generalized and not specific way ... Thus in both compositions of Et in Arcadia Ego (Chatsworth and Louvre) the theme is the realization of death in life. The specific models hardly matter. We are not intended to have sympathy with them and instead we are forced by the artist to think on the theme."^[13]

Poussin is an important figure in the development of landscape painting. In his early paintings the landscape usually forms a graceful background for a group of figures; later he progressed to the painting of landscape for its own sake, although the figure is never entirely absent. Examples are Landscape with St. John on Patmos (1640), (Art Institute of Chicago) and Landscape with a Roman Road (1648), (Dulwich College Picture Gallery).

The finest collection of Poussin's paintings is at the Louvre in Paris. Other significant collections are in the National Gallery in London; the National Gallery of Scotland; the Dulwich Picture Gallery; the Musée Condé, Chantilly; the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; and the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Poussin was a prolific artist. Among his many works are:

The Four Seasons: Summer, or Ruth and Boaz, 1660–1664, oil on canvas, 118 x 160 cm, Louvre Museum

The Continence of Scipio, 1640, oil on canvas, 116 x 150 cm, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

• Some of the paintings by Poussin at the Louvre, Paris:
  • The Plague at Ashdod (1630)
  • Les Bergers d’Arcadie (late 1630s)
  • The Judgment of Solomon (1649)
  • The Blind Men of Jericho (1650)
  • The Adulteress (1653)
  • The Four Seasons (series) (1660–1664)

• A few of Poussin’s other paintings:
  • Adoration of the Golden Calf (National Gallery, London)
  • Holy Family on the Steps (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.)
  • Cacus (St. Petersburg)
  • The Testament of Eudamidas (Copenhagen)
  • Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus (1634)^[14]
  • Tancred and Erminia, second version (Barber Institute, Birmingham)
  • The Rape of the Sabine Women (1636)
  • The Destruction of Jerusalem (1637)
  • Hebrews Gathering Manna (1639)
  • A Dance to the Music of Time (1639-40), (Wallace Collection, London)
  • Moses Rescued from the Waters (1647)
  • Eliezer and Rebecca (1648)
  • The Funeral of Phocion (1648) (National Museum Cardiff)
  • Landscape with Polyphemus (1649)
  • Seven Sacraments (Double series - The first series was commissioned by Cassiano del Pozzo in the second half of the 1630s and was sold to the Dukes of Rutland in 1784. One of the seven, "Penance", was destroyed in a fire at the Rutland's Belvoir Castle in 1816, and "Baptism" was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1939. The remaining 5 were still at Belvoir Castle at the time when Anthony Blunt wrote his catalogue in 1966. The second series was painted for Paul Freart de Chantelou from 1644-1648 and was acquired by the Dukes of Bridgewater in 1798. The paintings passed by descent to the Earls of Ellesmere, the last of whom became the Duke of Sutherland in 1964. All of the second series, which was commissioned by Chantelou, is currently on loan at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.^[15] The images listed below are the remaining six paintings of the first series:

  1) Baptism (image)

  2) Ordination (image)

  3) Confirmation (image)

  4) Penance (image)

  5) Eucharist (image)

  6) Marriage (image)

  7) Extreme Unction (image)

Legacy

Nymph and satyrs, ca 1627 (National Gallery, London)

Initially, Poussin's genius was recognized only by small circles of collectors. (In the two decades following his death, a particularly large collection of his works was amassed by Louis XIV.)^[16] At the same time, it was recognized that he had contributed a new theme of "classical severity" to French art.

Benjamin West, an American painter of the 18th century who worked in Britain, based his canvas of the death of General Wolfe at Quebec on Poussin's example. As a result, the image is one in which each character gazes with appropriate seriousness on Wolfe's death after securing British domination of North America.

Jacques-Louis David resurrected a style already known as "Poussinesque" during the French Revolution in part because the leaders of the Revolution looked to replace the frivolity and oppression of the court with Republican severity and civic-mindedness, most obvious in David's dramatic canvas of Brutus receiving the bodies of his sons, sacrificed to his own principles, and the famous death of Marat.

Throughout the 19th century, Poussin, available to the ordinary person's gaze because the Revolution had opened the collections of the Louvre, was inspirational for thoughtful and self-reflexive artists who pondered their own work methods, notably Cézanne, who strove to "recreate Poussin after nature", and the Post-Impressionists. The less thoughtful enjoyed the eroticism of some of Poussin's classicizing subjects (illustration, left).

In the twentieth century art critics have suggested that the "analytic Cubist" experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were founded upon Poussin's example.^[17] The work of Jean Hugo was also influenced by Poussin.

The most famous 20th-century scholar of Poussin was the Englishman Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, who in 1979 was disgraced by revelations of his complicity with Soviet intelligence.^[18]

Today, Poussin's paintings at the Louvre reside in a gallery dedicated to him.

Gallery

Venus and Adonis - Nicolas Poussin - 1624 - Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.	Cephalus and Aurora - Nicolas Poussin - 1627 - National Gallery, London.	Acis and Galatea - Nicolas Poussin - 1629 - National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.	Diana and Endymion - Nicolas Poussin - 1630s - The Detroit Institute of Arts.
Venus, a Faun and Putti - Nicolas Poussin - 1630s - The Hermitage Museum, St-Petersburg.

See also

• Baroque
• Western painting
• History of painting
• Et in Arcadia ego

Notes

1. ^ His Lives of the Painters was published in Rome, 1672. Poussin's other contemporary biographer was André Félibien.
2. ^ These "Marino drawings" preserved at Windsor Castle are among the very few identifiable works of Poussin executed before his arrival in Rome.
3. ^ Standring, Timothy. "Poussin's Erotica", Apollo_(magazine), 2009-03-01. Retrieved on 2009-05-28.
4. ^ In a census of 1624 (Friedlaender).
5. ^ In the Barberini inventory; now at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The Meleager sarcophagus seen by Poussin is that now in the Capitoline Museums.
6. ^ Blunt, Anthony. Nicholas Poussin, Phaidon 1958, p. 85-88.
7. ^ Blunt 1958, p.55.
8. ^ Blunt 1958, 54-9.
9. ^ Wright 1984, p.18.
10. ^ There is a first sketch in the British Museum
11. ^ Wright 1985, p. 211
12. ^ Wright 1985, p. 254
13. ^ ^{a b} Wright 1985, p. 13.
14. ^ New layer discovered in French masterpiece
15. ^ Blunt 1966
16. ^ Wright 1985, pp. 255, 261
17. ^ Wilkin, Karen. The "High Art" of Nicolas Poussin. The New Criterion on line.
18. ^ see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives. Picador USA 2003.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Blunt, Anthony (1966). The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue. London: Phaidon. OCLC 349831
• Blunt, Anthony (1967), Nicolas Poussin, Pallas Athene, ISBN 1-873429-64-9 
• Friedländer, Walter (1964). Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach. New York: Abrams. 1964. OCLC 2922468
• Keazor, Henry: Poussins Parerga. Quellen, Entwicklung und Bedeutung der Kleinkompositionen in den Gemälden Nicolas Poussins. Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 1998, ISBN 3795411467
• Keazor, Henry : Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665. Taschen, Hong Kong, Köln, London et al., 2007, ISBN 3822853194/ISBN 978-3822853191
• Mérot, Alain (1990), Nicolas Poussin, Abbeville Press, ISBN 1558591206 
• Wright, Christopher (1985). Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Hippocrene. ISBN 0870522183

Exhibitions

• Paris 1960. "Poussin peintre: retrospectif." Galvanized the renewed interest in Poussin.
• Fort Worth 1988. "Poussin: The Early Years in Rome: The Origins of French Classicism."
• New York City 2008. "Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions." Metropolitan Museum of Art; Poussin's landscapes.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Nicolas Poussin

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nicolas Poussin

• Landscape with the ashes of Phocion at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
• Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion at the National Museum Cardiff
• Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• www.NicolasPoussin.org 92 works by Nicolas Poussin
• Nicolas Poussin at Olga's Gallery
• extensive information regarding Poussin's patrons
•  "Nicolas Poussin". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Nicolas_Poussin. 

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