The final years of Nicolas Poussin

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 that phase. Yet he also executed more dramatic history paintings, certain of which are overtly inspired by the work of Raphael. By that 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 that 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 that 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 humankind. These reflect the artist’s prevailingly stoical attitude toward life and his philosophical resignation in the face of death. The supreme achievement in this vein is Four Seasons, painted 1660–64, a set 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 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.”

Legacy

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, and 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.

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