Nicolas Poussin (French: [nikɔlɑ pusɛ̃]; June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was the leading painter of the classicalFrench Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a small group of Italian and French collectors. He returned to Paris for a brief period to serve as First Painter to the King under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon returned to Rome and resumed his more traditional themes. In his later years he gave growing prominence to the landscapes in his pictures. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained a major inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne.
Details of Poussin's artistic training are somewhat obscure. Around 1612 he traveled to Paris, where he studied under minor masters and completed his earliest surviving works. His enthusiasm for the Italian works he saw in the royal collections in Paris motivated him to travel to Rome in 1624, where he studied the works of Renaissance and Baroque painters—especially Raphael, who had a powerful influence on his style. He befriended a number of artists who shared his classicizing tendencies, and met important patrons, such as Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo. The commissions Poussin received for modestly scaled paintings of religious, mythological, and historical subjects allowed him to develop his individual style in works such as The Death of Germanicus, The Massacre of the Innocents, and the first of his two series of the Seven Sacraments.
Such collaborations were common - in the 1630s Poussin only produced small private commissions, with foreground figures in his own hand and background architecture by a specialist painter such as Le Maire. The first record of the painting dates to the 19th century, when it was in the United Kingdom, passing through the hands of John Knight, Higginson and Nieuwenhuis before being acquired by the Duke of Aumale. Read more...
The musée Nicolas Poussin is a museum in Andelys in France. It is housed in an 18th-century house and named after the painter Nicolas Poussin, born in the hamlet of Villers, near Andelys, in 1594. Its collections include 18th-century furniture, religious objects, window glass, a 3rd-century Gallo-Roman mosaic, 19th- and 20th-century paintings and a painting of Coriolanus by Poussin himself. Read more...
A Dance to the Music of Time is a painting by Nicolas Poussin in the Wallace Collection in London. It was painted between about 1634 and 1636 as a commission for Giulio Rospigliosi (later Pope Clement IX), who according to Gian Pietro Bellori dictated its detailed iconography. The identity of the figures remains uncertain, with differing accounts.
The painting is well known for giving its name to the A Dance to the Music of Time novel cycle, though this title is first seen in a Wallace Collection catalogue of 1913. Before that it was given titles referring to the Four Seasons. In the 1845 sale it was called La Danse des Saisons, ou l'Image de la vie humaine. Read more...
The Death of Chione is a 1622 painting by Nicolas Poussin, his first known surviving work. He produced it during a stay in Lyon and in February 2016 it was acquired by that city's Museum of Fine Arts. It shows the death of Chione, lover of both Hermes and Apollo - she had compared her beauty to that of Apollo's sister Artemis, who hunted her down and killed her by shooting an arrow through her tongue. Read more...
Extreme Unction (or ‘Final Anointing’) is one of a set of seven scenes representing the sacraments of the Catholic Church, painted between 1638 and 1640 by the French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665).
Commissioned in Rome by the renowned connoisseur Cassiano dal Pozzo, the scene depicts a dying man being anointed with oil in accordance with the rites of the early Roman church. To enhance the realism of the scene, Poussin drew on his extensive study of the art and artefacts of classical antiquity to represent the costumes, setting, and the structure of the painting itself, with the figures disposed frieze-like across the composition. This classicising tendency went on to make an inestimable impact on Western art, influencing many of the greatest painters of subsequent generations, from Jacques-Louis David and Ingres to Cézanne and Picasso; even today artists continue to be inspired by Poussin’s work and ideas about painting. Read more...
This page is a list of paintings by Nicolas Poussin (Andelys, 15 June 1594 – Rome, 19 November 1665). The attributions vary notably from one art historian to another. Jacques Thuillier, one of the most restrictive, produced a list in 1994 that gave 224 uncontested autograph works and 33 works with minor or major doubts about their attribution to Poussin. Certain attributions have since changed, when paintings thought lost are rediscovered, meaning that this list cannot be considered exhaustive. Read more...
The Adoration of the Shepherds is a painting of 1633–34 by the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), now in the National Gallery, London (Room 19). It is in oils on canvas, and measures 97.2 by 74 centimetres (38.3 in × 29.1 in) (with uneven edges). Unusually for Poussin, it is signed "N. Pusin.fe" ["fecit"] on the stone at lower right. By 1637, soon after it was painted, it was owned by Cardinal Gian Carlo de' Medici (1611–1663), the second son of Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany and was placed in his villa outside Florence.
It belongs to a group of paintings with a predominately "coppery" colour scheme, from which its dating mainly derives. Classicising elements have been added to the usual figures. Read more...
In 1671 an argument broke out in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris about whether drawing or color was more important in painting. On one side stood the Poussinists (Fr. Poussinistes) who were a group of French artists, named after the painter Nicolas Poussin, who believed that drawing was the most important thing. On the other side were the Rubenists (Fr. Rubénistes), named after Peter Paul Rubens, who prioritize color. There was a strong nationalistic flavour to the debate as Poussin was French but Rubens was Flemish, though neither was alive at the time. After over forty years the final resolution of the matter in favor of the Rubenists was signalled when Antoine Watteau'sThe Embarkation for Cythera was accepted as his reception piece by the French Academy in 1717. By that time the French Rococo was in full swing. Read more...
Poussin painted two versions of the subject under the same title; his earlier version, painted in 1627, is held at Chatsworth House. An earlier treatment of the theme was painted by Guercino circa 1618–22, also titled Et in Arcadia ego. Read more...
The Four Seasons (frLes Quatre Saisons) was the last set of four oil paintings completed by the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). The set was painted in Rome between 1660 and 1664 for the Duc de Richelieu, the nephew of Cardinal Richelieu. Each painting is an elegiac landscape with Old Testament figures conveying the different seasons and times of the day. Executed when the artist was in failing health suffering from a tremor in his hands, the Seasons are a philosophical reflection on order in the natural world. The iconography evokes not only the Christian themes of death and resurrection but also the pagan imagery of classical antiquity: the poetic worlds of Milton's Paradise Lost and Virgil's Georgics. The paintings currently hang in a room on their own in the Louvre in Paris. Read more...