Painter, born near Les Andelys, NW France. He went to Rome in 1624, and spent the rest of his life there, apart from a short visit (16402) to Paris. The greatest master of French Classicism, deeply influenced by Raphael and the Antique, his masterpieces include two sets of the Seven Sacraments (163640, 16448).
Nicolas Poussin (15 June 1594–November 19, 1665) was a French painter, the founder and greatest practitioner of 17th century French classical painting.
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
Nicolas Poussin's early biographer was his friend 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, where he entered the studios of the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle and then of Georges Lallemand, both minor masters now remembered for having tutored Poussin. 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. 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 (Friedlaender), Poussin was married. and Fréart de Chanteloup, 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 1643, disgusted by the intrigues of Simon Vouet, Fouquières and the architect Jacques Lemercier, Poussin withdrew to Rome.
Poussin left no children, but he adopted as his son Gaspar Dughet (Gasparo Duche), his wife's brother, who took the name of Poussin.
Works
The finest collection of Poussin's paintings as well as of his drawings is at the Louvre; 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.
Poussin was a prolific artist. Among his many works are:
Some of the paintings by Poussin at the Louvre, Paris: The Plague at Ashdod The Judgment of Solomon (1649) The Blind Men of Jericho (1650) The Adulteress (1653) Arcadian Shepherd A few of Poussin’s other paintings: Adoration of the Golden Calf (National Gallery, London); (Source: Anthony Blunt, "The Paintings of Nicholas Poussin." Phaidon Press, London: 1966.) 1) Baptism (image) 2) Ordination (image) 3) Confirmation (image) 4) Penance (image) 5) Eucharist (image) 6) Marriage (image) 7) Extreme Unction (image) A Dance to the Music of Time (1639-40), (Wallace Collection, London)Historical reception of Poussin
Poussin has had a profound influence on French and on world art as a self-reflexive "artist's artist".
Initially, Poussin's genius was recognized only by small circles of collectors.
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. Subsequently many military painters of the 19th century followed Poussin's compositional examples in order to make sure the strategic situation, or role of the favored individual, was highlighted properly in an era when people learned facts from paintings.
Jacques-Louis David resurrected a style already known as "Poussinesque" during the French revolution in part because the leaders of the Revolution, following in part the American example, 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.
Ironically, as official French art became standardized with the establishment, under the returned monarchy, the monarchy of the "Citizen King" and the Second Empire, of institutions for the support and normalization of French art, the leading and most successful Salon artists, at one and the same time, apotheosized Poussin while departing from his spirit. Ingres' paintings, while in a superficial polish emulating "Poussin" are far more in the late-Romantic and Orientalizing spirit, combining significant distortion with a photographic sheen that would have puzzled Poussin.
Bouguereau's nudes and classical-genre paintings give likewise a superficial homage to "Poussin" as a club with which to keep down the canaille but their photographic sheen, again, has nothing to do with the painterly struggles which are evident in Poussins in galleries (which even the best reproductions do not show).
The post-Impressionists were in fact more deeply influence by Poussin.
Cézanne's artistic career, in fact, somewhat tracked that of Poussin who in early life experimented (with a signal lack of success) in dramatic colors and diagonal compositions. Poussin was stumbling after Caravaggio while Cézanne was haunted by the demon of a powerful sexuality later sublimated;
In late life Cézanne announced that he was recreating Poussin "after nature", which may seem strange, since Cézanne, unlike Poussin, painted directly on the canvas and without Poussin's 17th century mechanisms of predrawn "cartoons" pounced onto the canvas and underpainting in monochrome.
What Cézanne meant, and what is evident in his late work, is a painterly pursuit of three-dimensional composition in space. This is evident when we compare Poussin to David, for David had the neo-Classical tendency to see the Poussinesque as a frieze;
Just as Mont Ste-Victoire is so clearly, in the late Cézanne, situated beyond the railway cut and bay, the only person in Poussin's painting to actually notice Euridyce's distress is a fisherman, to whom the eye is led in the near background after it travels through a group of wedding guests, arranged not in a frieze but in three dimensions.
In the twentieth century any number of 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 (see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Picador USA 2003).
Today, Poussin's paintings at the Louvre reside in a gallery dedicated to him. "Poussin: The Early Years in Rome: The Origins of French Classicism."
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