Poussin, Nicolas (1594–1665)

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POUSSIN, NICOLAS (1594–1665)

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.

See also Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography ; Classicism ; Claude Lorrain (Gellée) ; David, Jacques-Louis ; Le Brun, Charles ; Painting ; Rome, Art in .