Everything about Nicolas Poussin totally explained
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 as First Painter to the King.
Early career
Giovanni Pietro Bellori, 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 wasn't 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.
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, 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.
Early years in Rome
In Rome, his patron having died, Poussin, who lodged at first with
Simon Vouet, 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, 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.
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's 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.
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. 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. 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
Gaspard Dughet (Gasparo Duche), his wife's brother, who became a painter and took the name of Poussin.
Works
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. 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:
- Some of the paintings by Poussin at the Louvre, Paris:
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 Rape of the Sabine Women (1636)
- The Destruction of Jerusalem (1637)
- Hebrews Gathering Manna (1639)
- Moses Rescued from the Waters (1647)
- Eliezer and Rebecca (1648)
- Landscape with Polyphemus (1649)
- Seven Sacraments (Double series - The first series was commissioned by Cassiano del Pozzo in the second half of the 1630s and was sold to the Dukes of Rutland in 1784. One of the seven, "Penance", was destroyed in a fire at the Rutland's Belvoir Castle in 1816, and "Baptism" was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1939. The remaining 5 were still at Belvoir Castle at the time when Anthony Blunt wrote his catalogue in 1966. The second series was painted for Paul Freart de Chantelou from 1644-1648 and was acquired by the Dukes of Bridgewater in 1798. The paintings passed by descent to the Earls of Ellesmere, the last of whom became the Duke of Sutherland in 1964. All of the second series, which was commissioned by Chantelou, is currently on loan at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. The images listed below are the remaining six paintings of the first series:
:1) Baptism (image)
:2) Ordination (image)
:3) Confirmation (image)
:4) Penance (image)
:5) Eucharist (image)
:6) Marriage (image)
:7) Extreme Unction (image)
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.) At the same time, it was recognized that he'd 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.
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.
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.
Today, Poussin's paintings at the Louvre reside in a gallery dedicated to him.
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