Nicolas Poussin (born June 1594, Les Andelys, Normandy [France]—died November 19, 1665, Rome, Papal States [Italy]) was a 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. Toward 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.
Beginnings
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.
About 1622 Poussin executed six large tempera paintings for the Jesuits (none of those survive), and in the following year he received a commission for a painting in a Notre-Dame chapel. The Notre-Dame painting, The Death of the Virgin (1623), went missing following the French Revolution and was known until the 21st century only by a preparatory drawing. The painting was discovered in a small church in the town of Sterrebeek outside Brussels and restored. 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. Until the discovery of The Death of the Virgin, the so-called “Marino drawings” were 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.
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About 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 about 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.
