^ Died
on 19 November 1665: Nicolas Poussin, French
painter and etcher born on 15 June 1594 in Villers. Moved to Rome in
1623, where he died. His classicism influenced generations of French
painters, including David, Delacroix, and Cézanne.
— Nicolas Poussin, the greatest French
artist of the 17th century, is considered one of the founders of the
European classicism, the movement in art, based on antique and Renaissance
heritage.
Poussin was born in Les-Andelys, Normandy.
The son of an impoverished family, Poussin received some early professional
training at home. In 1612 Poussin left for Paris, where he entered the
workshop of the mannerist painter J. Lallemald. The training was reinforced
by independent study of mainly Italian art in the Royal Collections.
By the end of 1610s Poussin became authoritative master, the evidence
of this are his commissions for decoration for the Luxembourg Palace
in Paris, and the big altarpiece Assumption of Virgin. Unfortunately
from the works of the first Paris period (1612-23) only drawings on Ovid’s
Metamorphoses survived.
In 1623 the artist came to Italy, first
to Venice, where he enriched his French training with the sensuous splendor
of Venetian painting. And in 1624 he came to Rome, where he stayed all
his life, except for his trip to Paris in 1640-42. Poussin’s new friends
in Rome were mainly classical scholars, who played the main role in turning
Poussin into a philosopher, erudite and intellectual. The 1620s in Italy
were for Poussin the years of intensive learning, and active creative
work. Within four years he achieved a young painter’s highest aim, he
was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for a chapel in St. Peter’s Cathedral
Martyrdom
of St. Erasmus (1628-29). At that period he acquired the dynamic
style already dominant in Europe, the style that we now know as Baroque.
It was at this time that he produced the most baroque of all his pictures,
the altarpiece The
Virgin of the Pillar Appearing to St. James the Greater, which
was ordered for a church in the Spanish Netherlands. Eventually this
work reached not the town of Valenciennes but the collection of Cardinal
Richelieu and finally came to Louis XIII and to the Louvre. Poussin was
evidently frustrated and disappointed by his lack of success in the intensely
competitive field of baroque altarpiece painting. He never attempted
this style again.
After a short crisis he chose the more
restrained and intellectual direction of development, which appealed
to the learned tastes of his Roman friends. In 1629 Poussin married his
landlord’s daughter. The first Roman period (1624-30) on the whole is
characterized by mythological themes, with sweet love, poetical inspiration,
carefree happiness in harmony with nature.
In the next decade history became the
main subject of Poussin’s work. The artist is attracted by the situations,
in which moral qualities of people reveal themselves. In pictures of
1630s the compositions are complex and compound with many characters,
they remind the classical tragedy on stage. Poussin used a special box
and wax figures: first he built his compositions, then started to draw
preliminary sketches, and only then painted. The best-known works of
the period are – The
Rescue of Pyrrhus (1634), The
Noble Deed of Scipio (1640). The very popular in his time were
the so-called bacchanal series, commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu. One
of them, which survived, is Triumph
of Neptune and Amphitrite (1634). Those paintings were supposed
to decorate the cardinal’s palace, and this fact indicates that the interest
to Poussin in France grew. In the second half of 1630s the young artists
in Paris chose to follow Poussin’s style in historical genre. The King’s
officials wanted to return the artist to France. Poussin did not hurry
back. He came to France only in 1840, after they had passed him the King’s
threat. In Paris Poussin was immediately appointed the person in charge
of all art works in King’s palaces. This caused the violent jealousy
on the part of other court artists; Vouet headed the opposition.
For about two years Poussin painted altarpieces, canvases for Richelieu
and supervised the decorative works in the Big Gallery in Louvre. Surrounded
by hatred and jealousy, Poussin did not finish the work and fled to Rome.
His artistic and moral ideals stood in conflict with those of monarch.
In his late Roman period (1642-65) Poussin
continued to work mainly in historical genre. The most important work
of that period is the series Seasons (1660-64).
Poussin’s work influenced the further
development of European painting. His authoritative interpretations of
ancient history and Greek and Roman mythology left their mark on European
art down to the 19th century.
— Poussin was a leader of pictorial
classicism in the Baroque
period. Except for two years as court painter to Louis XIII, he spent
his entire career in Rome. His paintings of scenes from the Bible and
from Greco-Roman antiquity influenced generations of French painters,
including Jacques-Louis David, J.-A.-D. Ingres, and Paul Cézanne.
Childhood and early travels
Poussin was born in a small hamlet on the Seine River, the son of small
farmers. He was educated at the nearby town of Les Andelys, and he apparently
did not show any interest in the arts until the painter Quentin Varin
visited the village in 1612 to produce several paintings for the Church
of Le Grand Andely. Poussin's interest in the arts was awakened, and
he decided to become a painter. As this was impossible in Les Andelys,
he left his home, going first to Rouen and then to Paris to find a suitable
teacher. His poverty and ignorance made this search very difficult. He
found no satisfactory master and studied at different times under several
minor painters. During this period Poussin endured great hardships and
had to return to his paternal home, where he arrived ill and humiliated.
Recovering after a year, Poussin again set out for Paris, not only to
continue his studies but also to pursue another aim. While previously
in Paris, he had been exposed to the art of the Italian High Renaissance
through reproductions of Raphael's
paintings. These engravings, according to his biographer Giovanni Battista
Passeri, inspired him to go to Rome, which was then the center of the
European art world. But only in 1624 was Poussin successful in reaching
Rome, with the help of Giambattista Marino, the Italian court poet to
Marie de Médicis.
First Roman period
Marino commissioned Poussin to make a series of mythological drawings
illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses. Poussin meanwhile experimented with
various painting styles then current in Rome, an important influence
being that of the Bolognese painter Domenichino.
Poussin's culminating work of this period was a large altarpiece for
St. Peter's representing the Martyrdom
of St. Erasmus (1629). But it was a comparative failure with
the artistic community in Rome, and Poussin never again tried to compete
with the Italian masters of the Baroque style on their own ground. Thereafter
he would paint only for private patrons and would confine his work to
formats rarely larger than five feet in length.
Between Poussin's arrival in Rome in 1624 and his departure for France
in 1640 he came to know many of Rome's most influential people, among
them Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary to Cardinal Barberini, whose rich
collection of ancient Roman artifacts had a decisive influence upon Poussin's
art. Through Pozzo, who became Poussin's patron, the French painter became
a fervent admirer of ancient Roman civilization. From about 1629 to 1633
Poussin took his themes from classical
mythology and from Torquato Tasso, and his painterly style became
more romantic and poetic under the influence of such Venetian masters
as Titian.
Such examples of his work at this time as The Arcadian Shepherds (1629)
and Rinaldo and Armida (c. 1629) have sensuous, glowing colors and manage
to communicate a true feeling for pagan antiquity.
In the mid-1630s Poussin began deliberately to turn toward Raphael and
Roman antiquity for his inspiration and to evolve the purely classical
idiom that he was to retain for the rest of his life. He also began painting
religious themes once more. He began with stories that offered a good
pageant, such as The
Worship of the Golden Calf (1636) and The
Rape of the Sabine Women (1637). He went on to choose incidents
of deeper moral significance in which human reactions to a given situation
constitute the main interest. The most important works that exemplify
this phase are those in the series of Seven
Sacraments painted in 1634-42 for Pozzo. While other artists
painted in the style of the Roman Baroque, Poussin tried in these works
to fashion a style marked by classical clarity and monumentality. This
style was inspired by Roman pre-Christian architecture and Latin books
on moral conduct, as well as by the nobility and greatness of Raphael's
works, which, as he believed, had renewed the spirit of antiquity.
Painter to Louis XIII
Between 1638 and 1639 Poussin's achievements in Rome attracted the attention
of the French court. Louis XIII's powerful minister Cardinal Richelieu
tried to persuade Poussin to return to France. Eventually Poussin reluctantly
acceded to this request, journeying to Paris in 1640. Though received
with great honors, Poussin nevertheless soon found himself in trouble
with the ministers of the king as well as with the French artists, whom
he met with the utmost arrogance. He was offered commissions for kinds
of work he was not used to nor really qualified to execute, including
altarpieces and the decoration of the Grande Gallerie of the Louvre palace.
What he produced did not elicit the praise he expected, so he left Paris
in defeat in 1642 and returned to Rome. Unfortunately he did not live
to see his own style of painting accepted and eventually glorified by
the French Academy in the late 17th century.
Second Roman period
Many of Poussin's paintings on religious and ancient Roman subjects done
in the 1640s and '50s are concerned with moments of crisis or difficult
moral choice, and his heroes are those who reject vice and the pleasures
of the senses in favor of virtue and the dictates of reason - e.g., Coriolanus,
Scipio, Phocion, and Diogenes. Poussin's painterly style was consciously
calculated to express such a mood of austere rectitude: such solemn religious
works as Holy
Family on the Steps (1648) exhibit only a few figures, painted
in harsh colors against the severest possible background. In the landscapes
Poussin began painting at this time, such as Landscape
with the Body of Phocion Carried out of Athens (1648) and Landscape
with Polyphemus (1649), the disorder of nature is reduced to
the order of geometry, and the forms of trees and shrubs are made to
approach the condition of architecture. The composition in these paintings
is worked out very carefully and has an unusual clarity of structure.
Poussin's health declined from 1660 onward, and early in 1665 he ceased
to paint. He died that year and was buried in San Lorenzo in Lucina,
his Roman parish church.
Assessment
Poussin believed in reason as the guiding principle of art, yet his figures
are never merely cold or lifeless. They may resemble figures used by
Raphael or ancient Roman sculptures in their poses, but they retain a
strange and unmistakable vitality of their own. Even in Poussin's late
period, when all movement, including gesture and facial expression, had
been reduced to a minimum, his forms harmoniously combine vitality with
intellectual order.
— LINKS
— The Holy
Family with Ten Figures (1650, 84x109cm)
— Apollon
et les Muses — Adoration du Veau d'Or
— Enlèvement des Sabines
— Boaz et Ruth
— Jésus et la Femme Adultère
— Jésus Guérissant l'Aveugle
— Bacchanale
Before a Temple |
^
Murdered on 19 November 1942: Bruno
Schultz, Polish Jewish writer, literary critic, and graphic artist
born on 12 July 1892 [self~portrait >]. 
