Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin (Les Andelys, Normandy, 1594 – Rome, 1665) was a French painter who spent most of his working life in Rome and is regarded as the founder and leading exponent of French classical painting in the seventeenth century. His works, mostly on religious, mythological and historical subjects, are marked by clarity of expression, logic of composition and order. Preferring design to colour, he regarded drawing as the foundation of painting, and in his later years he gave growing prominence to landscape. His influence lasted into the twentieth century, when classically minded artists such as Jacques-Louis David, Ingres and Paul Cézanne took him as a point of reference.

Early Years in Normandy and Paris

According to his first biographer, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Poussin was born near Les Andelys in Normandy and received an education that included some Latin, a skill that would serve him well later. His early drawings attracted the attention of Quentin Varin, a local painter, although his biographers do not mention formal training in Varin's studio. Some of his later works nevertheless show Varin's influence in their storytelling, the precise expression of faces, and finely painted drapery in rich colour. His parents seem to have opposed a painting career, and around 1612, at the age of eighteen, he set off for Paris.

He arrived in a city where art was flourishing, thanks to royal commissions from Marie de' Medici for the decoration of her palace and to wealthy Parisian merchants who bought pictures. Poussin was not a member of the powerful guild of master painters and sculptors, which held a monopoly over most commissions and took legal action against outsiders who tried to enter the trade. His early drawings nevertheless won him places in the studios of established painters. He spent about three months with the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle, who worked almost exclusively as a portraitist, a genre that held little interest for him. He then probably spent a month with Georges Lallemand, whose lack of attention to precise drawing and to the articulation of figures displeased him. Poussin also did not fit well into the studio system, in which several painters worked on one canvas, and from then on he preferred to work very slowly and alone.

Little is known about his life in Paris. Court records show that he accumulated considerable debts that he could not pay. He studied anatomy and perspective, but the most important event of this first stay was his discovery of the royal art collections, thanks to his friendship with Alexandre Courtois, valet de chambre to Marie de' Medici. There he saw for the first time engravings after Giulio Romano and, above all, Raphael, whose work would have an enormous influence on his style.

Failed Journeys to Rome and the Friendship with Marino

He first tried to reach Rome in 1617 or 1618, but got only as far as Florence, from where, as Bellori reports, a mishap sent him back to France. On his return he began painting for Paris churches and convents. In 1622 he tried again and again stopped short, this time at Lyon. That same year he received his first major commission: the Jesuits asked him for a series of six large paintings to celebrate the canonization of their founder, Saint Francis Xavier. The originality and energy of these works, now lost, brought him further commissions.

Giambattista Marino, the court poet of Marie de' Medici, engaged him to make a series of fifteen drawings, eleven illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses and four showing battle scenes from Roman history. These so-called Marino drawings, now at Windsor Castle, are among the earliest identifiable works by Poussin. Marino's influence brought further commissions, including decorations for the Luxembourg Palace and a painting of the death of the Virgin, now lost, for the family chapel of the first Archbishop of Paris, Jean-François de Gondi. The friendship with Marino, and his work illustrating the poet's verse, which drew him to Ovidian themes, are thought to have underpinned or at least reinforced the marked eroticism of his early work.

Marino took him into his household and, when he returned to Rome in 1623, invited Poussin to join him. Poussin first finished his outstanding commissions in Paris and reached Rome in the spring of 1624, at the age of thirty.

Rome: Difficult Beginnings and the Barberini Patronage

Rome was still the great artistic centre of Europe. The new pope, Urban VIII, elected in 1623, was determined to keep it that way, and artists from across Europe gathered there. Poussin could study Raphael and other Renaissance painters in churches and convents, as well as the work of the Carracci, Guido Reni and Caravaggio, whose painting he detested, saying that Caravaggio had been born to destroy painting. He attended the Academy of Domenichino to study the nude, and frequented the Accademia di San Luca, where the leading painters of Rome met. Its head in 1624 was another French painter, Simon Vouet, who first offered him lodging.

Through Marino he met Cardinal Francesco Barberini, brother of the new pope, and Cassiano dal Pozzo, the cardinal's secretary and a keen scholar of ancient Rome and Greece, who both became important patrons. The first years were hard, however. Marino left Rome for Naples soon after Poussin arrived and died there in 1625. Barberini was appointed papal legate to Spain and also left, taking Dal Pozzo with him. Poussin fell ill with syphilis and, refusing to enter a hospital where care was very poor, was unable to paint for months. He survived by selling the pictures he had for a few scudi.

He was taken in and cared for by the family of a cook named Jacques Dughet, and by about 1629 he had largely recovered. On 1 September 1630 he married Anne-Marie Dughet, the cook's daughter. His two brothers-in-law were artists, and Gaspard Dughet later took Poussin's surname. When Barberini and Dal Pozzo returned to Rome in 1626, their patronage brought him two major commissions. The first was The Death of Germanicus (1627–1628) for Cardinal Barberini, a painting that draws learnedly on textual and visual sources, including Tacitus's Annals and the Meleager sarcophagus. Its stoic restraint and pictorial clarity established his reputation as a major artist.

Public Commissions and the Turn to Private Patrons

The success of Germanicus led to a more prestigious commission: an altarpiece of the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus for the chapel of St Erasmus in St Peter's Basilica, now in the Vatican Pinacoteca. The Fabbrica di San Pietro had first given the commission to Pietro da Cortona, who had produced only preliminary designs before being moved to another project. Thanks to Dal Pozzo's influence, Poussin was chosen to paint the altarpiece following Cortona's original design. With its plunging diagonal composition and strong narrative drama, the Martyrdom is Poussin's most openly Baroque work. Yet for reasons that remain unclear, it did not please officials and brought him no further papal commissions, making it his only one.

The disappointment, together with the loss of a competition for a fresco cycle in San Luigi dei Francesi, persuaded him to give up large public commissions and their competitions, content restrictions and political manoeuvring. He turned instead to private collectors, for whom he could work more slowly and with greater control over subject and style. His early private patrons included, besides Barberini and Dal Pozzo, the canon Gian Maria Roscioli, Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi, for whom he painted a second version of Et in Arcadia ego, and Cardinal Luigi Omodei, who received the Triumphs of Flora (c. 1630–1632, Louvre). He painted the Massacre of the Innocents for the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, and Cardinal Richelieu commissioned several Bacchanals. Dal Pozzo became the owner of the first series of the Seven Sacraments, painted in the late 1630s.

Buoyed by this commercial success, in 1632 he bought a life interest in a small house on the Via Paolina (Babuino), near the Trinità dei Monti, and entered his most productive period. Works such as Parnassus, The Inspiration of the Poet, Echo and Narcissus and The Plague at Ashdod were already known among collectors, and the combination of clearly arranged figures and carefully built landscapes began to define his manner.

The Return to France (1640–1642)

As his work became known in Rome, he received invitations to return to Paris for important royal commissions, proposed by François Sublet de Noyers, Superintendent of the King's Buildings under Louis XIII. Poussin at first declined. Noyers then sent his cousins Roland Fréart de Chambray and Paul Fréart de Chantelou to Rome to persuade him, offering the title of First Painter to the King and a substantial residence in the Tuileries Palace. Poussin agreed, and by December 1640 he was back in Paris.

His letters to Dal Pozzo and his other friends in Rome show that he valued the money and honours, but he was soon overwhelmed by commissions, particularly because he was used to working slowly and carefully. The new projects included The Institution of the Eucharist for the chapel of the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and The Miracle of Saint Francis Xavier for the altar of the Jesuit novitiate church. He was also asked for ceilings and vaults for the Grand Galerie of the Louvre, and for a large allegorical painting for the study of Cardinal Richelieu, Time Defending Truth from the Attacks of Envy and Discord, in which the figure of Truth clearly stood for the cardinal. He was expected to design royal tapestries and frontispieces for the royal printing house. He completed a Last Supper, now in the Louvre, eight cartoons for the Gobelins tapestry works, drawings for a proposed series on the Labours of Hercules and a Triumph of Truth for Richelieu. He also faced criticism from supporters of other French painters, including his old friend Simon Vouet.

The court intrigues and the endless workload left him discontented. In the autumn of 1642, when the king and court were away from Paris in Languedoc, he found a pretext to leave and returned for good to Rome.

Final Years in Rome and the Rise of Landscape

When he returned to Rome in 1642 he found a changed art world. Urban VIII had died in 1644, and his successor, Innocent X, was less interested in patronage and preferred Spanish to French culture. The Barberini had left for France. Poussin kept a few important patrons, among them Dal Pozzo and the future Cardinal Camillo Massimi, and began to paint more often for the clients he had won in Paris. In 1643 he sold the furnishings of his Tuileries house and settled for the rest of his life in Rome. After the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII in 1642 and 1643, Sublet de Noyers lost his position, but Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, began to collect Poussin's work.

His French clientele grew in these years. In 1647 André Félibien, secretary of the French embassy in Rome, became his friend and pupil in painting, and published the first book devoted entirely to his work. The Abbé Louis Fouquet, brother of Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances to the young Louis XIV, obtained for him in 1655 official recognition of his old title of First Painter and payment for his earlier French commissions. In gratitude Poussin made designs for the baths Fouquet was building at his château of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Another important French patron was Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who visited Rome in 1643 and commissioned some of his most important works, among them the second series of the Seven Sacraments, painted between 1644 and 1648, and the Landscape with Diogenes.

In this period landscape gained prominence. In his early work it had been a pleasant background for groups of figures; later it became the central element, although the figures never entirely disappeared. Around 1650 his health declined and his right hand trembled more and more, as can be seen in his late drawings. Even so, in his final years he painted some of his most ambitious works, among them Orion Blinded Searching for the Rising Sun, Landscape with Hercules and Cacus and the series The Seasons. His wife died in 1664, and afterwards his health declined rapidly. He died in Rome on 19 November 1665 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina. He had no children of his own, but he adopted his brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, who became a painter and took his surname.

Subjects, Style and Method

Each of Poussin's paintings tells a story. Although his formal education was limited, he became very knowledgeable about religious history, mythology and classical literature, and he usually drew his subjects from these fields, often after consulting his clients. Many of his pictures combine several episodes that occur at different times into one composition, and the gestures and expressions of the figures show their varied reactions. Apart from his self-portraits, he never painted contemporary subjects. Religious subjects were the most common, since the Church was the main patron in Rome and there was growing demand for devotional pictures in private homes. He took many themes from the Old Testament, which offered more variety and stories open to invention; in The Massacre of the Innocents he reduced the general slaughter to a single brutal incident, and in The Judgement of Solomon the story is read in the varied expressions of the participants.

His mythological and poetic works draw on classical literature and on the literature of his own time. He painted scenes from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered: in Renaud and Armide the Christian knight Renaud dies at the hands of the sorceress Armide, who, seeing his face, turns her hatred into love. Allegories of death are common too. Et in Arcadia ego, which he painted twice, shows idealized shepherds examining a tomb bearing the title phrase, a reminder of death's constant presence. According to the art historian Christopher Wright, Poussin wanted viewers to think about the subject rather than feel sympathy for the figures. His style stood apart from the decorative tendency of French art of his time. He rejected the emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Bernini and Pietro da Cortona and stressed the intellectual side of painting. His aim was clarity of expression, achieved through disegno, or 'nobility of design', in preference to colore.

In the 1620s and 1630s he studied antiquity and Titian's Bacchanals, and his palette became cooler, his brushwork drier and his figures more like actors placed in a well-defined space. He did not make detailed figure drawings as preparation for his paintings and seems not to have used assistants. To work out compositions he arranged small wax figures in a box open on one side, like a stage. His pen-and-wash drawings included landscapes studied from nature and compositional sketches. Pierre Rosenberg described him as a draughtsman who was 'not brilliant, elegant or seductive', but whose lack of virtuosity was offset by uncompromising rigour.

Legacy

After his death his style had a strong influence on French art, above all through Charles Le Brun, who had worked briefly with him in Rome and who, like him, became a court painter and head of the French Academy in Rome. His work also influenced Jacques Stella, Sébastien Bourdon, Pier Francesco Mola and Gerard de Lairesse. In the art world a debate arose between the supporters of Poussin, who held that drawing was the essential part of painting, and the followers of Rubens, who gave colour the higher place. During the French Revolution Jacques-Louis David championed his style, partly because the revolutionary leaders wanted to replace the frivolity of court art with republican seriousness, and his influence can be seen in works such as Brutus and The Death of Marat. Benjamin West found inspiration for The Death of General Wolfe in Poussin's The Death of Germanicus.

In the nineteenth century Poussin became a hero for those who sought a national French school, and he appeared in plays, stories and novels. Ingres, who studied in Rome, admired him as the first and only painter to capture the nature of Italy. Delacroix, Ingres's great rival, wrote that Poussin was one of the greatest innovators in the history of painting. Cézanne valued his classicism, and in 1907 Maurice Denis described Cézanne himself as 'the Poussin of Impressionism'. In the twentieth century Picasso made a series of paintings on The Rape of the Sabine Women in 1963, and Markus Lüpertz painted a series based on Poussin's works in 1989–1990. His finest collection is today in the Louvre in Paris, with other significant holdings in the National Gallery in London, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.