Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin (June 1594–November 19, 1665) was a French painter.
Poussin was the founder and greatest practitioner of 17th century French classical painting. His work symbolizes the virtues of clarity, logic, and order. It has influenced the course of French art up to the present day.
He spent most of his working life painting in Rome except for a short period when Cardinal Richelieu ordered him back to France as Painter for the King.
Until the 20th century he remained the dominant inspiration for such classically oriented artists as Jacques Louis David and Paul Cezanne.
Life
He was born near Les Andelys, now in the Eure département, in Normandy. Early sketches attracted the notice of Quentin Varin, a local painter, whose pupil Poussin became, till he went to Paris, where he entered the studio of Ferdinand Elle, a Fleming, and then of the Lorrainer L'Allemand. He found French art in a stage of transition: the old apprenticeship system was disturbed, and the academical schools destined to supplant it were not yet established; but, having met Courtois the mathematician, Poussin was fired by the study of his collection of engravings after Italian masters.
After two abortive attempts to reach Rome, he fell in with the chevalier Marini at Lyon. Marini employed him on illustrations to his poems, 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. There, his patron having died, Poussin fell into great distress. Falling ill he was received into the house of his compatriot Dughet and nursed by his daughter Anna Maria to whom in 1629, Poussin was married.
Among his first patrons were Cardinal Barberini, for whom was painted the Death of Germanicus (Barberini Palace); Cardinal Omodei, for whom he produced, in 1630, the Triumphs of Flora (Louvre); Cardinal de Richelieu, who commissioned a Bacchanal (Louvre); Vicenzo Giustiniani, for whom was executed the Massacre of the Innocents, of which there is a first sketch in the British Museum; Cassiano dal Pozzo, who became the owner of the first series of the Seven Sacraments (Belvoir Castle); and Fiart de Chanteloup, with whom in 1640 Poussin, at the call of Sublet de Noyers, returned to France.
Louis XIII conferred on him the title of first painter in ordinary, and in two years at Paris he produced several pictures for the royal chapels (the Last Supper, painted for Versailles, now in the Louvre) and eight cartoons for the Gobelins, 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, Feuquires and the architect Lemercier, Poussin withdrew to Rome. There, in 1648, he finished for De Chanteloup the second series of the Seven Sacraments (Bridgewater Gallery), and also his noble landscape with Diogenes throwing away his Scoop (Louvre); in 1649 he painted the Vision of St Paul (Louvre) for the comic poet Scarron, and in 1651 the Holy Family (Louvre) for the duke of Crqui. Year by year he continued to produce an enormous variety of works, many of which are included in the list given by Flibien. He died in Rome on November 19, 1665 and was buried in the church of St Lawrence in Lucina, his wife having predeceased him.
Poussin left no children, but he adopted as his son Gaspar Dughet (Gasparo Duche), his wife's brother, who took the name of Poussin.
==Works==
The finest collection of Poussin's paintings as well as of his drawings is possessed by the Louvre; but, besides the pictures in the National Gallery and at Dulwich, England possesses several of his most considerable works: The Triumph of Pan is at Basildon House, near to Pangbourne, (Berkshire), and his great allegorical painting of the Arts at Knowsley. At Rome, in the Colonna and Valentini Palaces, are notable works by him, and one of the private apartments of Prince Doria is decorated by a great series of landscapes in distemper.
Throughout his life he stood aloof from the popular movement of his native school. French art in his day was purely decorative, but in Poussin we find a survival of the impulses of the Renaissance coupled with conscious reference to classic work as the standard of excellence. In general we see his paintings at a great disadvantage, for the color, even of the best preserved, has changed in parts, so that the keeping is disturbed; and the noble construction of his designs can be better seen in engravings than in the original. Amongst the many who have reproduced his works Audran, Claudine Stella, Picart and Pesne are the most successful.
Poussin was a prolific artist, some of his many works are:
- Some of the paintings by Poussin at the Louvre, Paris:
- Plague at Ashdod
- The Judgment of Solomon (1649)
- The Blind Men of Jericho (1650)
- The Adulteress (1653)
- Arcadian Shepherd
- 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);
- The Destruction of Jerusalem (1637);
- Hebrews Gathering Manna (1639);
- Moses Rescued from the Waters (1647);
- Eliezer and Rebecca (1648);
- Seven Sacraments (double series - the first series is in the Bridgewater Gallery, London and the second is in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).
- A Dance to the Music of Time (1639-40), (Wallace Collection, London)
Historical reception of Poussin
Initially, Poussin's genius was recognized only by small circles of collectors and it appears from the record that he failed to please Louis XIV, being, it appears, unfit for Court intrigue. At the same time, after his death, 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 traveled to Europe in the way of that time, 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 (including a rather fanciful Native American) knows how to gaze with appropriate seriousness on Wolfe's famous death after securing British domination of North America. Subsequently many military painters of the 19th century followed Poussin's compositional examples in order to make sure the strategic situation, or role of the favored individual, was highlighted properly in an era when people learned facts from paintings.
Jacques-Louis David resurrected a style already known as "Poussinesque" during the French revolution in part because the leaders of the Revolution, following in part the American example, 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 Cezanne.
Cezanne's artistic career, in fact, somewhat tracked that of Poussin who in early life experimented (with a signal lack of success) in dramatic colors and diagonal compositions. Poussin was stumbling after Caravaggio while Cezanne was haunted by the demon of a powerful sexuality later sublimated but both discovered that "clarity, order, and rigor" which personalities such as theirs have to adopt as a second or constructed nature.
In late life Cezanne announced that he was recreating Poussin "after nature", which was strange, since Cezanne, unlike Poussin, painted *alla prima* and without Poussin's 17th century mechanisms (recently deconstructed in David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge) of predrawn "cartoons" and underpainting in monochrome.
What Cezanne meant, and what is evident in his late work, is a painterly pursuit of three-dimensional composition in space. This is evident when we compare Poussin to David, for David made the neo-Classical mistake of imaging the Poussinesque as a frieze...when the examination, for example, of the painting of the marriage of Orpheus and Euridyce *in situ*, in the Louve, shows a complex three-dimensional drama.
Just as Mont Ste-Victoire is so clearly, in the late Cezanne, situated beyond the railway cut and bay, the only person in Poussin's painting to actually notice Euridyce's distress is a fisherman, to whom the eye is led in the near background after it travels through a group of wedding guests, arranged not in a frieze but in three dimensions.
In fact, the painting upon examination turns out to be about Orpheus' failure to "see" Euridyce, a failure echoed in the legend when Orpheus forbids Euridyce to look upon him as he escorts her from Hades.
In the twentieth century, any number of art critics have suggested that the "analytic Cubist" experiments of Picasso and Braque were founded upon Poussin's example.
The most famous, but now most notorious, avatar of Poussin's memory in the 20th century was Anthony Blunt. A member of a sort of Inner Ring, the Cambridge Apostles, Blunt grew up in an age of post-Empire weariness but at the same time was drawn, like a number of personalities through history, to Poussin's inwardness and erudition. Blunt became the curator of the Queen's picture collection but in 1979 was disgraced by revelations of his complicity with Soviet intelligence (see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Picador USA 2003).
This "complicity", as Ms. Carter's research shows, was mostly second-hand in that it included homosexual liaisons with some of the more directly-involved figures but Blunt made no attempt to fight the charges, which resulted in the withdrawal of his knighthood. In fact, the affair as retailed by Ms. Carter has family resemblances to Poussin's experience at court, and would have been comic opera in fancy dress were it not for the stakes involved...including Margaret Thatcher's seizure of power.
Today, Poussin's paintings rather moulder in dignity in a chamber of the Louvre dedicated to his memory while elsewhere, the go-ahead directors of the Louvre see fit to spend money (that could be spent on cleaning the Orpheus masterpiece) on a chamber dedicated to what American humorist P. J. O'Rourke has called Marie de Medici's "useless life", and a cleaning and restoration of the forgettable moment when Napoleon Bonaparte nicked the crown from the Pope, and crowned himself and then the de Beauharnais woman in turn.
This spares Poussin, and his latter-day adepts, from having to stand amid people with headphones and others who speculate upon painting, in the matter of the elegant mob which Poussin seems to have despised. We are thankfully left by the still waters of Diogenes and Euridyce to in fact reflect upon human vanity, and when we foregather with others in front of Poussin, we meet not tourists but, at times, fellow adepts.
External link and references
- Landscape with the ashes of Phocion at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
- Nicolas Poussin at Olga's Gallery
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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See Sandrart, A cad. nob, art. pict.; Lettres de Nicolas Poussin (Paris, 1824); Flibien, Entretiens; Gault de St Germain, Vie de Nicolas Poussin (1806); DArgenville, Abrg de Ia vie des peintres; Bouchitt, Poussin et son wuvre (1858); Emilia F. S. Pattison (Lady Dilke), Documents indits, Le Poussin, in LAn (1882).