Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin's early biographer, his friend Giovanni Pietro Bellori, relates that Poussin had been born near Les Andelys in Normandy and that he had received an education that included some Latin, which would stand him in good stead.

Early sketches had attracted the notice of Quentin Varin, a local painter, whose pupil Poussin became, until he ran away to Paris at the age of eighteen.

There he entered the studios of the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle and then of Georges Lallemand, both minor masters now remembered for having tutored Poussin.

He found French art in a stage of transition: the old apprenticeship system was disturbed, and the academic training destined to supplant it was not yet established by Simon Vouet; but having met Courtois the mathematician, Poussin had been fired by the study of his collection of engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi after Italian masters.

After two abortive attempts to reach Rome, he had fallen in with Giambattista Marino, the court poet to Marie de Medici, at Lyon.

Marino had employed him on illustrations to his poem Adone (untraced) and on a series of illustrations for a projected edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, taken him into his household, and in 1624 enables Poussin (who had been detained by commissions in Lyon and Paris) to rejoin him at Rome.

It has been suggested that it was this early friendship with Marino, and the commissioning of illustrations of his poetry (which drew on Ovidian themes), that founded, or at least reinforced, the prominent eroticism in Poussin's early work.

Poussin is thirty when he arrives in Rome.

At first he lodges with Simon Vouet.

Through Marino, he had been introduced to Marcello Sacchetti who in turn had introduced him to another of his early patrons, Cardinal Francesco Barberini.

Financial difficulties had arisen for Poussin with the departure to Spain of Barberini, accompanied by Cassiano dal Pozzo, the antiquarian and the Cardinal's secretary, who later would become a great friend and patron.

However, their return from Spain in 1626 had stabilized Poussin’s position, with renewed patronage by the Barberini and their circle.

Two major commissions at this period result in Poussin's early masterwork, the Barberini Death of Germanicus (1628), partly inspired by the reliefs of the Meleager sarcophagus, and the commission for St. Peter's that amounts to a public debut, the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus (1629, Vatican Pinacoteca), indebted to designs on the same subject by the contemporary Baroque painter, Pietro da Cortona.

Poussin, having fallen ill, had been taken into the house of his compatriot Jacques Dughet, where he had been nursed by Dughet’s daughter, Anna Maria, who Poussin marries in 1630.

His two brothers-in-law are artists and a nephew, Gaspard Dughet, will later took Poussin’s surname.

During the late 1620s and 1630s, Poussin has the opportunity to experiment and formulate his own stance in painting with reference to others which he does through study of the antique and works such as Titian’s Bacchanals at the Casino Ludovisi and the paintings of Domenichino and Guido Reni.

At the same time, the Roman Baroque is emerging: in the 1620s, Cortona was producing his early Baroque paintings for the Sacchetti family; Bernini, having established his reputation in sculpture, was designing the great bronze baldachin in St. Peter’s; and an ingenious architectural imagination was emerging in works by Borromini.

Poussin has become acquainted with other artists in Rome and tends to befriend those with classicizing artistic leanings: the French sculptor François Duquesnoy who he had lodged with in 1626; the French artist Jacques Stella; Claude Lorraine; Domenichino; Andrea Sacchi.

He has joined an informal academy of artists and patrons opposed to the current Baroque style that has formed around Joachim von Sandrart.

At this time the papacy is Rome’s foremost patron of the arts.

Poussin’s Martyrdom of St. Erasmus for St. Peter’s is Poussin’s only papal commission, secured for him by Cardinal Barberini, the papal nephew, and Poussin will not be asked again to contribute major altarpieces or paint large scale decorations for a pope.

His subsequent career will depend on private patronage.

Apart from Cardinal Francesco Barberini, his first patrons include Cardinal Aluigi Omodei, for whom he produces around 1630 to 1632 the Triumphs of Flora (Louvre), Cardinal de Richelieu, who commissions various Bacchanals; Vincenzo Giustiniani, for whom he will paint the Massacre of the Innocents (uncertain early date, Museé Condé, Chantilly); Cassiano dal Pozzo, who is to become the owner of the first series of the Seven Sacraments (late 1630s, Belvoir Castle); and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, with whom Poussin, at the call of Sublet de Noyers, will return to France in 1640.

The works of Poussin, who has throughout his life stood apart from the popular tendency toward the decorative in French art of his time, couple the surviving impulses of the Renaissance with conscious reference to the art of classical antiquity as the standard of excellence.

He values clarity of expression achieved by disegno or ‘nobility of design’ over colore or color, a concern which may be best appreciated in the line engraved copies of his works; Audran, Claudine Stella, Picart and Pesne are some of the most successfu among the many who reproduce his paintings.

Themes of tragedy and death are prevalent in Poussin's work, whose cerebral approach is exemplified ion Et in Arcadia ego, a subject he paints twice (the second version is seen at right); idealized shepherds examine a tomb inscribed with the title phrase, which is usually interpreted as a memento mori: "Even in Arcadia I exist", as if spoken by personified Death.

The architect of the Palais-Cardinal, Jacques Lemercier, had also received a commission to build a château and a surrounding town in Indre-et-Loire; the project has culminated in the construction of the Château Richelieu and the town of Richelieu.

To the château, Richelieu has added one of the largest art collections in Europe and the largest collection of ancient Roman sculpture in France.

(The heavily resurfaced and restored Richelieu Bacchus will continue to be admired by neoclassical artists.)

Among his three hundred paintings by moderns, most notably, he owns Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, The Family of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto, the two famous Bacchanales of Nicolas Poussin, as well as paintings by Veronese and Titian, and Diana at the Bath by Rubens, for which he is so glad to pay the artist's heirs three thousand écus, that he makes a gift to Rubens' widow of a diamond-encrusted watch.

His marble portrait bust by Bernini is not considered a good likeness and has been banished to a passageway.

Claude Lorrain had apparently befriended his fellow Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, with whom he has traveled the Roman Campagna, sketching landscapes.

Though both have been called landscape painters, in Poussin the landscape is a background to the figures; whereas for Claude, despite figures in one corner of the canvas, the true subjects are the land, the sea, and the air.

By report, he often engages other artists to paint the figures for him, including Courtois and Filippo Lauri.

He remarks to those purchasing his pictures that he sells them the landscape; the figures are gratis.

Claude Lorrain, in order to avoid repetition of subjects, and also to expose the many spurious copies of his works, makes tinted outline drawings (in six paper books prepared for this purpose) of all those pictures sent to different countries; and on the back of each drawing he writes the name of the purchaser.

These volumes he names the Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth).

This valuable work, engraved and published, has always been highly esteemed by students of the art of landscape.