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Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin 078.jpg
Self portrait by Nicolas Poussin, 1650
Born (1594-06-00)June 1594
near Les Andelys, Normandy, France
Died 19 November 1665(1665-11-19) (aged 71)
Rome, Papal States (now Italy)
Nationality French
Known for Painting
Notable work
 Et in Arcadia ego, 1637–38
Movement Classicism
Baroque

Nicolas Poussin (June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was the leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a small group of Italian and French collectors. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained a major inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne.

Early years

Poussin was born near Les Andelys in Normandy. Details of Poussin's artistic training are somewhat obscure. André Félibien, his early friend and biographer, reported that young Poussin "was busy without cease filling his sketchbooks with an infinite number of different figures which only his imagination could produce." His early sketches attracted the notice of Quentin Varin, who passed some time in Andelys, but there is no mention by his biographers that he had a formal training in Varin's studio, though his later works showed the influence of Varin, particularly by their storytelling, accuracy of facial expression, finely painted drapery and rich colors. His parents apparently opposed a painting career for him, and in or around 1612, at the age of eighteen, he ran away to Paris.

Career as an artist

Poussin arrived in Paris during the regency of Marie de Medici, when art was flourishing as a result of the royal commissions given by Marie de Medici for the decoration of her palace, and by the rise of wealthy Paris merchants who bought art. There was also a substantial market for paintings in the redecoration of churches outside Paris destroyed during the French Wars of Religion, which had recently ended, and for the numerous convents in Paris and other cities. However, Poussin was not a member of the powerful guild of master painters and sculptors, which had a monopoly on most art commissions and brought lawsuits against outsiders like Poussin who tried to break into the profession.

His early sketches gained him a place in the studios of established painters. He worked for three months in the studio of the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle, who painted almost exclusively portraits, a genre that was of little interest to Poussin. Afterward, he is thought to have studied for one month in the studio of Georges Lallemand, but Lallemand's inattention to precise drawing and the articulation of his figures apparently displeased Poussin. Moreover, Poussin did not fit well into the studio system, in which several painters worked on the same painting. Thereafter he preferred to work very slowly and alone. Little is known of his life in Paris at this time. Court records show that he ran up considerable debts, which he was unable to pay. He studied anatomy and perspective, but the most important event of his first residence in Paris was his discovery of the royal art collections, thanks to his friendship with Alexandre Courtois, the valet de chambre of Marie de Medicis. There he saw for the first time engravings of the works of Giulio Romano and especially of Raphael, whose work had an enormous influence on his future style.

He first tried to travel to Rome in 1617 or 1618, but made it only as far as Florence, where, as his biographer Bellori reported, "as a result of some sort of accident, he returned to France." On his return, he began making paintings for Paris churches and convents. In 1622 made another attempt to go to Rome, but went only as far as Lyon before returning. In the summer of the same year, he received his first important commission: the Order of Jesuits requested a series of six large paintings to honor the canonization of their founder, Saint Francis Xavier. The originality and energy of these paintings (since lost) brought him a series of important commissions.

Giambattista Marino, the court poet to Marie de Medici, employed him to make a series of fifteen drawings, eleven illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses and four illustrating battle scenes from Roman history. The "Marino drawings", now at Windsor Castle, are among the earliest identifiable works of Poussin. Marino's influence led to a commission for some decoration of Marie de Medici's residence, the Luxembourg Palace, then a commission from the first Archbishop of Paris, Jean-François de Gondi, for a painting of the death of the Virgin (since lost) for the Archbishop's family chapel at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Marino took him into his household, and, when he returned to Rome in 1623, invited Poussin to join him. Poussin remained in Paris to finish his earlier commissions, then arrived to Rome in the spring of 1624.

In Rome Poussin studied the works of Renaissance and Baroque painters—especially Raphael, who had a powerful influence on his style. He befriended a number of artists who shared his classicizing tendencies, and met important patrons, such as Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo. The commissions Poussin received for modestly scaled paintings of religious, mythological, and historical subjects allowed him to develop his individual style in works such as The Death of Germanicus, The Massacre of the Innocents, and the first of his two series of the Seven Sacraments.

He was persuaded to return to France in 1640 to be First Painter to the King but, dissatisfied with the overwhelming workload and the court intrigues, returned permanently to Rome after a little more than a year.

In Rome, Poussin lived an austere and comfortable life, working slowly and apparently without assistants. 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. Nonetheless, in his final eight years he painted some of the most ambitious and celebrated of his works, including The Birth of Bacchus, Orion Blinded Searching for the Sun, Landscape with Hercules and Cacus, the four paintings of The Seasons and Apollo in love with Daphné.

His wife Anne-Marie died in 1664, and thereafter his own health sank rapidly. On 21 September he dictated his will, and he died in Rome on 19 November 1665 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina.

Subjects

Each of Poussin's paintings told a story. Though he had little formal education, Poussin became very knowledgeable in the nuances of religious history, mythology and classical literature, and, usually after consulting with his clients, took his subjects from these topics. Many of his paintings combined several different incidents, occurring at different times, into the same painting, in order to tell the story, and the affetti, or facial expressions of the participants, showed their different reactions. Aside from his self-portraits, Poussin never painted contemporary subjects.

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, but later the landscape played a larger and larger role and dominated the figures, illustrating stories, usually tragic, taken from the Bible, mythology, ancient history or literature. His landscapes were very carefully composed, with the vertical trees and classical columns carefully balanced by the horizontal bodies of water and flat building stones, all organized to lead the eye to the often tiny figures. The foliage in his trees and bushes is very carefully painted, often showing every leaf. His skies played a particularly important part, from the blue skies and gray clouds with bright sunlit borders (a sight often called in France "a Poussin sky") to illustrate scenes of tranquility and the serenity of faith, such as the Landscape with Saint John on Patmos, painted in the late 1630s before his departure for Paris; or extremely dark, turbulent and threatening, as a setting for tragic events, as in his Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651). Many of his landscapes have enigmatic elements noticeable only with closer inspection; for example, in the center of the landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, despite the storm in the sky, the surface of the lake is perfectly calm, reflecting the trees.

Between 1650 and 1655, Poussin also painted a series of paintings now often called "townscapes", where classical architecture replaces trees and mountains in the background. The painting The Death of Saphire uses this setting to illustrate two stories simultaneously; in the foreground, the wife of a wealthy merchant dies after being chastised by St. Peter for not giving more money to the poor; while in the background another man, more generous, gives alms to a beggar.

Style and method

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. Rejecting the emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, he emphasized the cerebral. His goal was clarity of expression achieved by disegno or 'nobility of design' in preference to colore or color.

During the late 1620s and 1630s, he experimented and formulated his own style. He studied the Antique as well as works such as Titian's Bacchanals (The Bacchanal of the Andrians, Bacchus and Ariadne, and The Worship of Venus) at the Casino Ludovisi and the paintings of Domenichino and Guido Reni.

In contrast to the warm and atmospheric style of his early paintings, Poussin by the 1630s developed a cooler palette, a drier touch, and a more stage-like presentation of figures dispersed within a well defined space.

Contrary to the standard studio practice of his time, Poussin did not make detailed figure drawings as preparation for painting, and he seems not to have used assistants in the execution of his paintings.

Legacy

In the years following Poussin's death, his style had a strong influence on French art, thanks in particular to Charles Le Brun, who had studied briefly with Poussin in Rome, and who, like Poussin, became a court painter for the King and later the head of the French Academy in Rome. Poussin's work had an important influence on the 17th-century paintings of Jacques Stella and Sébastien Bourdon, the Italian painter Pier Francesco Mola, and the Dutch painter Gerard de Lairesse.

The finest collection of Poussin's paintings today 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, Saint Petersburg; and the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

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