10 Interesting facts about Nicolas Poussin

10 Interesting facts about Nicolas Poussin

Autoportrait of Nicolas Poussin in 1650. Sourced from Wikipedia

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was probably the best painter of his time. The king Louis XIV acquired himself no less than 31 of his paintings.

Yet, he is not as famous as he deserved. The man did not have the eccentries of some of his famous colleague and remained simple. Poussin’s paintings are acclaimed by art specialists but do not attract big crowds in the museum.

His work is one of those where you have to be introduced to it to fully appreciate it. You need to get the references and the messages present in the paintings. Perhaps that’s the reason why he was called the favorite painter of the philosophers.

Read on and I will tell you about his life, his techniques and his famous paintings.

1. Poussin can be considered as a Roman painter by adoption

Poussin was born in 1594 from a noble but poor family from Normandy. In 1612 he left his family without permission to be trained in painting in Paris. This is where he discovered works from the Italian painters of the Renaissance, Raphael and Giulio di Pietro.

Fascinated by their art, the young Poussin is obsessed by the idea to visit Rome. However, his poverty made the project difficult. In 1617-1618 he made a first trip to Italy but stopped in Florence. It is in Paris that he met his first success in 1622.

The Italian poet Giambattista Marina took him under his wing. When the poet came back to Italy, Poussin followed him a few months after.

There, he painted for the workshop of Simon Vouet. This painter was another French that came in Italy to absorb the beauty of the Italian renaissance.

Autoportrait of Simon Vouet. Sourced from Wikipedia

It was in Rome that Poussin built his reputation. After the departure of Vouet, Poussin became the most recognized French painter in Italy. It was the place where he reached the peak of his career.

This is with a great reluctance that he agreed to come back in France in 1640. In fact, the king Louis XIII had to order him and to send a man to bring him. As soon as he could, in 1642, he went back to Rome, where he died in 1665. He is buried in the church San Lorenzo in Lucina.

2. Poussin mostly worked for high nobles

At the difficult start of his career, Poussin worked for whoever offered him opportunities. His first success of 1622 was a commission from the Jesuit college in Paris. The six canvas he produced are lost today.

But as soon as he became really successful, in 1630, he refused the commission of the churches and monasteries. He preferred to work for rich sponsors.

The most important is the Cardinal Barberini, nephew of the pope. He became his protector when Giambattista Marina died. A commission of Barberini, The Death of Germanicus, was his second big success in 1628.

The Death of Germanicus. From Google Art Project. Sourced from Wikipedia

Among the French sponsors, there was the mighty Cardinal Richelieu, prime minister of Louis XIII. The king himself asked him to decorate his castle of Saint-Germain-In-Laye.

3. Poussin became official painter of the French king

When Poussin arrived in Paris in 1640, he received the official title of Ordinary Painter of the King. He was to decorate one of the main hallways of the Louvre palace, the Grande Galerie.

Today, this room is where you have the biggest numbers of the Italian Renaissance painters, the ones admired by Poussin.

But Paris, and especially the royal court, was a place of hard rivalries and conspiracies to gain influence.

Poussin had to face the opposition of the painter Jacques Fouquiers, who claimed the authorization to put his own painting in the galerie. The architect Lemercier became another opponent when Poussin decided to get rid of his decoration. Poussin also faced the artistic criticism of his former master Vouet and his followers.

Poussin was touched, annoyed and disgusted by all these oppositions against him. It probably played a major part in his decision to come back to Rome, only 2 years after his appointment in Paris.

When the king Louis XIII died in 1643, Poussin had his charge and his wage preserved. He continued to send art pieces to the king. While in Rome, he also got the opportunity to meet the young Charles le Brun who became later the official painter of Versailles.

4. Despite his success, Poussin remained quite simple

We have seen that Poussin endured misery in his youth and early career. His living conditions really improved in 1630 when he settled with his wife in a villa Via Paolina. But he never lived in the luxury he could have afforded.

An anecdote is revealing of his state of mind. One day, he reconducted himself with a lamp the Cardinal Mancini to the exit of his house. The surprised Cardinal, used to more luxury, said “I feel very sorry for you, Monsieur Poussin, for not having a single servant”. Poussin replied: “And I pity you much more, my lord, for having so many”.

Poussin cared about glory but not so much about money. He would write the reasonable price he asked for a painting in the back of the canvas. It is said that one time a very satisfied commissioner sent him more money. Poussin sent the extra money back to him.

5. Poussin’s working technique was unique

Poussin intellectualized his work a lot. Before starting a painting, he could elaborate and prepare it mentally for a long time.

He would then realize a drawing. Eventually, he started to paint directly on the canvas without preparatory studies.

His specificity was he sometimes worked on the composition of his painting with wax figurines. He put in a box the characters, the landscape or the layout of the room.

He would watch this 3D representation from various angles and with various lights to gain control on the structure of his painting.

6. Poussin biggest interest was in an idealized Antiquity

Poussin lived in a period when Antiquity was highly-revered culturally and artistically. The Greeks and Roman authors, who had published embellished and flattering visions of their civilizations, were absorbed by Poussin’s contemporaries often without critical thinking.

Poussin wanted to get back to the purity and greatness of the Antiquity. Too intelligent not to realize the potential gap with the historical reality, he wanted to retain and reflect what was the most inspiring for the men of his time.

He was looking for what the French called the “Beau Idéal” (ideal beauty): an abstract beauty that could be created by the harmony within and between the different elements of the paintings.

He opposed the Dutch school that represented ordinary people in a more realistic way.

He declared: “What does it matter to me in a painting the meeting of twenty ordinary heads? It is a beautiful temper, a great expression that I desire; it is the delicacy, the gravity, the majesty of a head that I seek.

[…] Posterity, which knows great men only by the facts worth of it, whose imagination is exalted, enlarged, embellished by thinking of the Scipios, the Cesar and the Brutus is wounded to see them in Flemish shapes, and shocked when given the personality and action of a heavy Dutch Burgomaster. We must not represent some deformities, only when they are consecrated by history or by sculpture.”

This taste for Antiquity is exemplified by his most famous painting, the rapt of the Sabines women.

The Rapt of the Sabines Women, sourced from Wikipedia

7. Poussin was nicknamed the French Raphael

We have seen that Raphael (1483-1520) struck the young Poussin. In his time, the artists learned their job by the imitation of the great masters. It is therefore by imitating the painting of Raphael, or their reproductions in Le Louvre and later in Rome, that Poussin elaborated his style.

Soon, Poussin earned the prestigious nickname of the “French Raphael” or the “New Raphael”. Raphael being considered by many at the time as the most talented painter ever, one could not dream of a more laudatory comparison.

The School of Athens, most famous fresco of Raphael. Sourced from Wikipedia

They had in common a quest for beauty, serenity and harmonious proportions. Poussin kept the rigorous but simple composition of Raphael, free from too much anecdotal details. They shared a common fascination for Antiquity and the Roman architecture.

Poussin’s art is not identical to that of Raphael: in one century painting had evolved. They slightly differed in the subjects represented and in the style, in the colors.

Another painter, Eustache Lesueur, contemporary of Poussin, received the same nickname. Both differed from the fashionable baroque style to invent French classicism.

8. Poussin was the main representant of French classicism

When Poussin started his career, European painting was strongly influenced by the works of the Italian painter Caravaggio. He had launched a new movement: the baroque style that spread from Italy to Spain and France.

Poussin differed with the baroque painters on many things. Whereas baroque painters favored the movement and sought to impress, Poussin’s painting are more sober, the scene represented are clear and ordered according to horizontal and vertical lines. You can feel it even in paintings like the Rapt of the Sabines women that described a panic.

The name classicism can refer to the taste for the most famous part of the Greco-Roman antiquity, known as the Classical Age. It can also be understood as a comeback to the Renaissance painters of the XVIth century, especially, as we have seen, Raphael.

Even if classicism had some Italian defenders, there was also something very typical of the XVIIth century France. This state for Antiquity, geometrical shapes and order could be seen in France in the architecture of official buildings and churches, in the gardens and in philosophy. It was the victory of reason over passions. Poussin, lover of Rome and Italy, remained French in his tastes and conceptions.

9. Poussin’s favorite painting was The Judgment of Salomon

The Judgment of Salomon, sourced from Wikipedia

Poussin said that among all the paintings he produced, his favorite was the Judgment of Salomon. The reason is the composition of the painting where Poussin managed to represent in one scene all the elements of the Biblical event.

The wise Salomon, king of Israel, is sited on his throne on top of the painting. The two women at his feet are mothers of two babies: one baby had died accidentally and they both claim to be the mother of the surviving one.

Salomon proposes to cut the baby in two. Poussin represents this moment by his movement of his right hand. He is obeyed by a soldier on the left of the canvas that seizes the baby and prepares to strike. One spectator, on the right, is horrified and hides his face from the coming crime.

One of the mothers, on the right, accepts the judgment, pointing her fingers toward the other mother to show her revenge. But this other mother is on her knees, her arms wide opened in a protective gesture, to implore the king to stop. She prefers to have the baby given to the other woman than to see it killed.

By this demand, she appears as the only mother who really cares about the baby. Convinced that she is the real mother, Salomon asks with his left hand to stop the action of the soldier.

This shows you the importance of the composition for Poussin. You can also notice the geometrical shapes in the painting: the pyramid made by Salomon and the two women and the horizontal lines that can be drawn where the heads and the feet of the characters are situated.

Of course, this means that Poussin’s work needs to take some time looking at it to understand the meaning of every part of the painting. Poussin did not try to impress immediately the viewers like the baroque painters but a moral message was often left to find and meditate.

A good knowledge of the Bible and the Greco-Roman mythology is also a pre-requisite. Some said that there are even double meanings to find in one of his paintings.

10. Poussin might have left esoteric secrets

It is common to think of great artists as mystical people: for instance painters like Da Vinci and Botticelli among others sparked some theories. Some assumed that they achieved their ideal of beauty through a mystical initiation, through the elevation of their soul by their spirituality.

Some have interpreted the works of Poussin on this angle and assumed he was initiated to some spiritual secrets.

In his two works The Shepherds of Arcadia, Poussin wrote “And in Arcadia ego” translated as “I am also in Arcadia”.

The second version of the Shepherds in Arcadia. From the Yorck Project, sourced from Wikipedia

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In the Greek mythology, Arcadia is in the mythology the country of Arcas, son of Jupiter and the nymph Callisto, associated with a region in Southern Greece. It was described by Greek poets as a paradise on earth.

The conventional interpretation of the inscription is that it evokes Death. It can mean “Myself, Death, I am also in Arcadia” or “Myself, buried here, I lived in Arcadia”. In other words, Death strikes even in this paradisiac country. This would be a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of Death.

Some believed that this inscription conceals something: it is the anagram of “I! Tego arcana dei” translated as “Go! I own the secret of God”.

This theory is supported by the honorary grave made for him by the novelist Chateaubriand in the XIXth century. The Shepherds of Arcadia are evoked and the Latin epitaph means “He is silent here but if you want to hear him speak, it is surprising how he lives and talks in his paintings”. This was seen as an invitation to find double meanings in his works.

Are these theories far-fetched? Or are they interesting lines of inquiry? I let you decide for yourself!

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I hope I gave you a desire to see Poussin by yourself. As the main representant of classicism, his paintings are in the collection of the most important museums in the world.

This is of course in Le Louvre that you will find most of his important paintings. 2 rooms are dedicated to him in the Sully gallery. I recommand to take a tour, especially because Poussin’s references often need some decipherings.