Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin (June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was a major figure in classical French Baroque painting, though he lived and worked in Rome for most of his career. His paintings, mostly religious or mythological, were created for a select circle of collectors in Italy and France. He briefly returned to Paris to become First Painter to King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon went back to Rome to focus on his usual subjects. In his later work, landscape became more important. His style emphasizes clarity, logic, and order, with line taking precedence over color.

Details of his early training are unclear. Around 1612, he went to Paris, studying with minor masters and producing his first surviving works. Seeing Italian art in the royal collections there inspired him to move to Rome in 1624. In Rome, he studied Renaissance and Baroque painters, especially Raphael, who deeply influenced him. He formed friendships with artists who shared his classical tastes and met key patrons like Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo. Commissions for small-scale religious, mythological, and historical paintings allowed him to develop his own 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*.

He was persuaded to return to France in 1640 as First Painter to the King, but after just over a year, unhappy with the heavy workload and court politics, he moved back to Rome for good. Important later works include *Orion Blinded Searching for the Sun*, *Landscape with Hercules and Cacus*, and *The Seasons*.

Poussin was born near Les Andelys in Normandy. His early biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori noted he received some Latin education. Another biographer, André Félibien, wrote that he constantly filled sketchbooks with figures from his imagination. His early drawings caught the attention of Quentin Varin, who spent time in Andelys, though there is no record of formal training with Varin. Still, Poussin’s later work showed Varin’s influence in storytelling, facial expression, drapery, and color. His parents apparently opposed his becoming a painter, and around age eighteen, in 1612, he ran away to Paris.

He arrived in Paris during Marie de' Medici's regency, a time when royal commissions and wealthy merchants fueled the art market. There was also demand for paintings to redecorate churches damaged in the recent French Wars of Religion and for convents. However, Poussin was not part of the powerful painters' guild, which held a monopoly on most commissions and sued outsiders like him. His early sketches got him into the studios of established painters. He worked three months for the Flemish portraitist Ferdinand Elle, but portraiture did not interest him. He then studied briefly with Georges Lallemand, but Lallemand’s loose drawing and figure articulation displeased him. Poussin did not fit the studio system, where multiple painters worked on one piece; he preferred to work slowly and alone. Little else is known of his early Paris years. Court records show he ran up debts he could not pay. He studied anatomy and perspective, but the key event was discovering the royal art collections through his friend Alexandre Courtois, valet to Marie de' Medici. There he first saw engravings of Giulio Romano and especially Raphael, which shaped his future style.

He first tried to reach Rome in 1617 or 1618 but only got as far as Florence, where, Bellori wrote, "as a result of some sort of accident, he returned to France." Back in France, he began painting for Paris churches and convents. In 1622, he tried again for Rome but only reached Lyon before returning. That summer, he got his first major commission: the Jesuits asked for six large paintings honoring the canonization of Saint Francis Xavier. The originality and energy of these lost works led to more important commissions. Giambattista Marino, court poet to Marie de' Medici, hired him to make fifteen drawings—eleven illustrating Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* and four showing Roman battle scenes. These "Marino drawings," now at Windsor Castle, are among his earliest identifiable works. Marino’s help led to a commission for decoration at the Luxembourg Palace, and then a commission from the first Arch...