Nicolas Poussin, (born June 1594, Les Andelys, Normandy [now France]—died November 19, 1665, Rome, Papal States [now Italy]), French painter and draftsman who founded the French Classical tradition. He spent virtually all of his working life in Rome, where he specialized in history paintings—depicting scenes from the Bible, ancient history, and mythology—that are notable for their narrative clarity and dramatic force. His earliest works are characterized by a sensuality and colouristic richness indebted to Venetian art, especially to Titian; but, by 1633, Poussin had repudiated this overtly seductive style in favour of a more rational and disciplined manner that owed much to the Classicism of Raphael and antiquity. The artist executed the majority of his canvases in this intensely idealized style. Towards the end of his life, Poussin’s art underwent a further transformation as he diversified to depict landscapes and a group of profoundly pantheistic allegorical works that were ultimately concerned with the order and harmony of nature. Though his reputation was eclipsed in the first half of the 18th century, it enjoyed a spectacular revival later that century in the Neoclassical art of Jacques-Louis David and his followers and has remained high ever since.
Born in or near the town of Les Andelys in Normandy, Poussin received an education in Latin and letters, but early on he showed an inclination for drawing. This talent was encouraged by the itinerant painter Quentin Varin, who visited Les Andelys in 1611–12 and became Poussin’s first teacher. About 1612 Poussin departed for Paris, where he studied anatomy, perspective, and architecture and worked with the minor masters Georges Lallemand and Ferdinand Elle. During this period he was introduced to engravings after the masters of the Italian Renaissance; this work inspired in him such enthusiasm that he made two attempts to visit Rome, both abortive, between 1619 and 1622. Around 1622 Poussin executed six large tempera paintings for the Jesuits, and in the following year he received a commission for a painting in a Notre Dame chapel (none of these survives). The works for the Jesuits brought him to the attention of the Italian poet Giambattista Marino, who commissioned a series of drawings based on Ovidian mythology and encouraged Poussin to visit Italy. Despite persistent attempts to identify other works by Poussin of this period, the so-called “Marino drawings” are the only certain works to survive from his pre-Roman years.
In the spring of 1624 Poussin arrived in Rome, where—except for a stay in Paris during 1640–42—he was to remain for the rest of his life. His first years there were marked by hardship and misfortune. Soon after his arrival, his early champion, Marino, moved from Rome to Naples, where he died in 1625. Destitute, Poussin executed a large number of biblical and mythological paintings in the hope of finding buyers. These works reveal the influence of the art of Venice—which he had visited en route to Rome—in their glowing colourism and loosely constructed compositions. Determining the exact chronology of his works during these years is highly problematic. However, an increasing level of skill in draftsmanship and use of colour in the large number of paintings datable to this period have led to a general consensus among scholars of the progression of his art between 1624 and 1627. Many of these works are poetic mythologies on themes of unrequited love, which are pervaded by an air of languor and melancholy. In their emotional intensity these pictures reveal an ardent Romanticism in the young Poussin that he would soon suppress.
Poussin served his apprenticeship in Rome by making copies after antiquity and the masters of the Renaissance and by studying the works of the Classicizing artists of his own day, including the Bolognese painter Domenichino. The fruits of these studies are apparent in his first great masterpiece, The Death of Germanicus (1627), painted for Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Inspired by comparable compositions on ancient sarcophagi, this is the first heroic deathbed scene in the artist’s career—and in the entire history of painting—and it spawned countless later imitations.
Around 1627 Poussin became acquainted with the scholar, antiquarian, and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo, who was destined to become his chief Italian patron and one of his closest friends. One year later, Pozzo assisted him in securing the commission for The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, an altarpiece for St. Peter’s. Poussin’s altarpiece did not meet with critical acclaim, however, and it effectively helped to end his career as a public painter in Rome. Deciding to concentrate instead on easel pictures of increasing subtlety and refinement, Poussin devoted much of his art of the late 1620s to romantic mythologies inspired by Titian and his fellow Venetians.
Stricken with illness around 1630, Poussin was nursed back to health by the family of Jacques Dughet, whose daughter, Anne-Marie, he married the same year. Her brother, Gaspard Dughet, eventually became one of the foremost landscape painters of 17th-century Rome and took the surname “Poussin” from his more illustrious brother-in-law.
By 1632 Poussin had been elected a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Rome, a mark of official recognition that provides evidence of his growing reputation. In the early 1630s his art also underwent a fundamental change of direction. Rejecting the seductive attractions of Venetian painting—with its lustrous colour and vibrant brushwork—he adopted instead a more severe and cerebral style that emphasized clearly delineated and modelled forms and cold, pure colours. His compositions also became more rigorously ordered, with the figures often arranged in a friezelike manner parallel to the picture plane, in the style of an ancient relief. The order and complexity of this new style led Poussin increasingly to rely on making detailed preparatory drawings for his pictures. The Adoration of the Magi of 1633 serves as a manifesto of his artistic conversion and is unashamedly modelled after an earlier work on this theme by the greatest Classical master of the Renaissance, Raphael.
With his reputation with collectors significantly improving, in 1635–36 Poussin secured a major commission from Cardinal Richelieu, first minister to Louis XIII of France, for a series of bacchanals to adorn the cardinal’s château outside Paris. Other prestigious commissions soon followed. Beginning in the late 1630s, Poussin executed an important work for the king of Spain, Philip IV, and for Pozzo a set of paintings representing the Seven Sacraments, or rites, of the early Christian church. In 1638 he painted The Israelites Gathering the Manna for Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who subsequently became his closest friend and greatest patron. This work is the most ambitious history painting of Poussin’s entire career and, by the artist’s own admission, was designed to be “read” by the viewer, with every figure, episode, and action intended to contribute to the drama. This intensely intellectual approach to painting—which aimed to encapsulate a complex sequence of events into a single, static image—would eventually earn Poussin the epithet of “painter-philosopher.”
A. A. Munger Collection, 1930.500/Photography © The Art Institute of ChicagoEarly in 1639 Poussin was invited to Paris to work for King Louis XIII. Initially reluctant to be uprooted from Rome, he was repeatedly pressured by Richelieu to heed the king’s command and eventually arrived in the French capital in December 1640. The next 18 months or so were among the unhappiest of the artist’s career. Named First Painter to the King upon his arrival in Paris, Poussin was entrusted with the decoration of the royal residences, executing designs for the Long Gallery of the Louvre, painting altarpieces for the king and members of his court, and even designing book illustrations. Much of this work was carried out with a team of assistants—a method of working that Poussin found deeply inimical to his creative integrity and independence. Frustrated by the range and diversity of the king’s commands, Poussin eventually secured permission to return to Rome in 1642, ostensibly to fetch his wife. The death of Richelieu in December of that year and of the king himself four months later absolved Poussin of ever returning to the French court, leaving the artist to spend the rest of his years in Rome.
Commissions from French patrons dominated the second half of Poussin’s career. The most important of these was for a second set of paintings of the Seven Sacraments, for Chantelou between 1644 and 1648, which is the central achievement of Poussin’s art. Reflecting the general development of his style during this period, these works were nobler and more monumental in conception than his earlier set for Pozzo and were intended to be more archaeologically accurate. In all of them, the scene is set in early Christian times, and Poussin sought to re-create the architecture, furniture, and costumes as they would have looked in the period. This principle of historical accuracy was subsequently codified by the French Academy into a doctrine of “decorum,” which had a lasting impact upon later history painting, especially during the Neoclassical period.
In 1647 Poussin outlined another theoretical principle that was to be crucially important for future generations of artists, particularly in the 19th century: his so-called “theory of the modes.” Basing his ideas on the modes of ancient music, Poussin observed that all aspects of a painting should be chosen to arouse an emotion in the viewer that is appropriate to the subject. Thus, severe themes should look grave and joyous ones uplifting. The implication of this is that the basic elements of painting—line, form, and colour—can themselves be entrusted to appeal directly to the emotions. Poussin certainly applied this principle throughout much of his career, typically employing discordant colour harmonies for tragic themes and seductive ones for tender and lyrical subjects. The repercussions of this theory extended far beyond his oeuvre, however, for the notion that the rudiments of painting are themselves inherently capable of arousing emotion is fundamental to the evolution of abstract art.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress CollectionThe later years of the 1640s constitute the high point of Poussin’s career, when he created some of his noblest figure paintings, among them Eliezer and Rebecca, The Holy Family on the Steps, and The Judgement of Solomon. In all of these the artist integrated the figures with their setting in a strict and uncompromising manner that resulted in scenes that are not only conceived in depth but also highly unified across the two-dimensional surface of the picture. The visual tensions between space and surface design generated in these works make them among the most austere creations of the artist’s career, but they also possess a splendour and finality that rank them among the very greatest masterpieces of Classical art. “I have neglected nothing,” declared Poussin, when questioned later in life on how he had attained such perfection in painting.
In 1648 Poussin embarked upon a series of landscape paintings that was destined to become a cornerstone of the Classical landscape tradition. The majority of these incorporate themes from ancient history and mythology, though some are without an identifiable literary subject. In all of them an intensely idealized view of landscape is combined with architecture, contrasting the “irregular” forms of the natural world with the geometrically perfected shapes of man’s own devising. Among the most heroic works of this period are the pendant compositions illustrating the story of Phocion. In the first of these, Poussin portrays the body of Phocion being carried out of Athens in a landscape of unparalleled grandeur and majesty, elevating this traditionally “inferior” genre of painting to the level of his most exalted history pictures.
In 1649–50 Poussin also painted two self-portraits that show him dressed in the manner of the ancients, whose art he so much admired. Having attained the most Classical phase of his art at this point, it is fitting that he should have been described by one critic in 1650 as “the Raphael of our century.”
Poussin continued to paint three or four pictures a year in the 1650s, despite being increasingly ill. Many of these works depict the Holy Family, a purely contemplative theme ideally suited to the serenity of his art during this phase. Yet he also executed more dramatic history paintings, certain of which are overtly inspired by the work of Raphael. By this stage of his career the artist’s work was so much in demand that he could choose his own subjects and set his own prices—unlike many of his greatest contemporaries. Despite this success, he employed no assistants or collaborators and reputedly never permitted anyone entry into his studio when he was working.
Poussin stopped painting landscapes in 1651, when he executed two pictures of violent storms that herald the mood of his very last works in this form. Resuming landscape painting in 1657, he no longer depicted the rationally ordered, Classical scenes of his earlier years but dwelt instead on the cycles and processes of the natural world and their omnipotence over mankind. These reflect the artist’s prevailingly stoical attitude towards life and his philosophical resignation in the face of death. The supreme achievement in this vein is a set on the Four Seasons, painted 1660–64, in which the cycles of human life are combined with those of the natural world, in keeping with the pantheistic theme of his late landscapes.
Little is known of Poussin’s religious beliefs, though he certainly did not endorse the ecstatic Catholicism of Counter-Reformation Rome. From his voluminous correspondence it is evident that the dominant influences on his thought were instead the teachings of the ancient Stoic philosophers and their neo-Stoic followers of his own day, who maintained that only virtue and inner strength afforded mankind any protection against the unpredictability of life. As early as 1643 Poussin had declared, “Whatever happens to me, I am resolved to accept the good and bear the evil. . . .We have nothing that is really our own; we hold everything as a loan.”
Poussin’s work marks a major turning point in the history of art; for, although it is steeped in the art of the past, it looks forward to that of the future. Already at his death, Poussin was venerated among French painters and theorists for having revived the tradition of the ancients and of the great masters of the Renaissance. This aspect of his art would be crucially important for Neoclassical painters such as David at the end of the 18th century. But it was already revered by the French Academy, led by Charles Le Brun, in the late 17th century. This soon led Le Brun into a theoretical dispute with Roger de Piles; their respective sides were known as Poussinists and Rubenists, the former upholding the importance of line over colour and the latter the reverse. The Rubenists eventually triumphed, and the result was the art of Antoine Watteau and the Rococo.
Later generations of artists, however, found other aspects of his genius to admire. Romantics such as Eugène Delacroix were attracted to the poetic mythologies of Poussin’s early Roman period and the visionary landscapes of his final years. In the mid-19th century, Camille Corot venerated Poussin as a master of Classical landscape, while, later in the century, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne rightly saw him as one of the supreme masters of abstract formal design. With the rise of the Neoclassical style of the 1920s, Pablo Picasso especially sought to emulate the purity, serenity, and grandeur of Poussin’s art. The diversity of his admirers and the longevity of his reputation can perhaps be best explained by the paradoxical nature of Poussin’s creative genius: he was, in essence, a romantic who became a classic.