Nicolas Poussin

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Nicolas Poussin (15 June 1594–November 19, 1665) was a French painter, the founder and greatest practitioner of 17th century French classical painting. His work embodies the virtues of clarity, logic, and order. 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 as Painter for the King.

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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, until he went to Paris, where 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 after Italian masters.

After two abortive attempts to reach Rome, he fell in with Marini, the court poet to Marie de Medici 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 Gaspard Dughet and nursed by his daughter Anna Maria to whom, in 1629, Poussin was married. Image:Tancred.jpg He lodged with the sculptor François Duquesnoy, of an equally classicizing artistic temperament, befriended Domenichino and joined an informal academy of artists and patrons opposed to the current Baroque style that formed around Joachim von Sandrart.

Among his first patrons were: Maffeo Cardinal Barberini, for whom was painted the Death of Germanicus (Palazzo Barberini); Cardinal Omodei, for whom he produced, in 1627, the Triumphs of Flora (Louvre); Cardinal de Richelieu, who commissioned a Bacchanal (Louvre); Vincenzo 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 Fréart 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. 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, 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 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 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 died in Rome on November 19, 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 Gaspar Dughet (Gasparo Duche), his wife's brother, who took the name of Poussin.

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Works

The finest collection of Poussin's paintings as well as of his drawings is at the Louvre; in the UK, 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 harmony is disturbed; and the noble construction of his designs can be better seen in engravings than in the original. Among the many who have reproduced his works, Audran, Claudine Stella, Picart and Pesne are the most successful.

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

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Historical reception of Poussin

Initially, Poussin's genius was recognized only by small circles of collectors. 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. Image:Poussin - Nymphes satyres.jpg 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. The less thoughtful enjoyed the eroticism of some Poussin's classicizing subjects (illustration, left).

Cézanne'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 Cézanne was haunted by the demon of a powerful sexuality later sublimated; but both discovered the "clarity, order, and rigor" which personalities such as theirs have to adopt as a second nature.

In late life Cézanne announced that he was recreating Poussin "after nature", which may seem strange, since Cézanne, unlike Poussin, painted directly on the canvas and without Poussin's 17th century mechanisms of predrawn "cartoons" pounced onto the canvas and underpainting in monochrome.

What Cézanne 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 had the neo-Classical tendency to see the Poussinesque as a frieze; and yet the examination, for example, of the painting of the marriage of Orpheus and Euridyce *in situ*, in the Louvre, shows a complex three-dimensional drama.

Just as Mont Ste-Victoire is so clearly, in the late Cézanne, 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 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were founded upon Poussin's example.

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 (see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Picador USA 2003).

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

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External link and references

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References

See J. von Sandrart, Acad. nob, art. pict.; Lettres de Nicolas Poussin (Paris, 1824); Félibien, Entretiens; Gault de St Germain, Vie de Nicolas Poussin (1806); D'Argenville, Abregé de la vie des peintres; Bouchitt, Poussin et son oeuvre (1858); Lady Dilke, Documents inédits, Le Poussin, in L'An (1882). ]

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