Nicolas Poussin

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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.

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[edit] Early career

Les Bergers d’Arcadie, late 1630s, oil on canvas, 85 x 121 cm, Louvre

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.

[edit] Early years in Rome

In Rome, his patron having died, Poussin, who lodged at first with Simon Vouet,[3] fell into great distress, with the departure for Spain of his early patron Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the Cardinal's secretary, the antiquary Cassiano dal Pozzo, later a great friend and patron. The return of Barberini from Spain in 1626 stabilized and renewed the patronage of the Barberini and their circle. Two major commissions at this period resulted in Poussin's early masterwork the Barberini Death of Germanicus, partly inspired by the reliefs of the Meleager sarcophagus,[4] and the commission for St. Peter's that amounted to a public debut, the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus (1630), with echoes of Pietro da Cortona. Falling ill at this time, he was received into the house of his compatriot Gaspard Dughet and nursed by his daughter Anna Maria to whom, in 1630, Poussin was married.[5]

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.

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, aside from Cardinal Francesco were: 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 Paul Fréart de Chantelou, with whom in 1640 Poussin, at the call of Sublet de Noyers, returned to France.

[edit] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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.

[edit] Works

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

The finest collection of Poussin's paintings, in addition to his drawings, is located in the Louvre in Paris. 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. The later version of Tancred and Erminia is at the Barber Institute in Birmingham. 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:

The Plague at Ashdod, 1630, oil on canvas, 148 x 198 cm, Louvre Museum
The Continence of Scipio, 1640, oil on canvas, 116 x 150 cm, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

[edit] Legacy

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.)[9] 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.

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

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.[10]

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.[11]

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

[edit] See also

Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nicolas Poussin

[edit] 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. ^ In a census of 1624 (Friedlaender).
  4. ^ In the Barberini inventory; now at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The Meleager sarcophagus seen by Poussin is that now in the Capitoline Museums.
  5. ^ Friedländer
  6. ^ Wright, 1985, p. 211
  7. ^ Wright, 1985, p. 254
  8. ^ Blunt, 1966
  9. ^ Wright, 1985, pp. 255, 261
  10. ^ Wilkin, Karen. The "High Art" of Nicolas Poussin. The New Criterion on line.
  11. ^ see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives. Picador USA 2003.

[edit] 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
  • Friedländer, Walter (1964). Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach. New York: Abrams. 1964. OCLC 2922468
  • Henry Keazor: Poussins Parerga. Quellen, Entwicklung und Bedeutung der Kleinkompositionen in den Gemälden Nicolas Poussins. Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 1998, ISBN 3795411467
  • Henry Keazor: Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665. Taschen, Hong Kong, Köln, London et al., 2007, ISBN-10 3822853194/ISBN-13 978-3822853191
  • Wright, Christopher (1985). Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Hippocrene. ISBN 0870522183

[edit] 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.

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Nicolas Poussin
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