Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin (June 1594–November 19, 1665) was a French painter.

Historical reception of Poussin

Initially, Poussin's genius was recognized only by small circles of collectors and it appears from the record that he failed to please Louis XIV, being, it appears, unfit for Court intrigue. At the same time, after his death, it was recognized that he had contributed a new theme, of "classical severity" to French art.

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Benjamin West, an American painter of the 18th century who traveled to Europe in the way of that time, based his canvas of the death of General Wolfe at Quebec on Poussin's example. As a result, the image is one in which each character (including a rather fanciful Native American) knows how to gaze with appropriate seriousness on Wolfe's famous death after securing British domination of North America. Subsequently many military painters of the 19th century followed Poussin's compositional examples in order to make sure the strategic situation, or role of the favored individual, was highlighted properly in an era when people learned facts from paintings.

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Jacques-Louis David resurrected a style already known as "Poussinesque" during the French revolution in part because the leaders of the Revolution, following in part the American example, looked to replace the frivolity and oppression of the court with Republican severity and civic-mindedness, most obvious in David's dramatic canvas of Brutus receiving the bodies of his sons, sacrificed to his own principles, and the famous death of Marat.

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Throughout the 19th century, Poussin, available to the ordinary person's gaze because the Revolution had opened the collections of the Louvre, was inspirational for thoughtful and self-reflexive artists who pondered their own work methods, notably Cezanne.

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Cezanne's artistic career, in fact, somewhat tracked that of Poussin who in early life experimented (with a signal lack of success) in dramatic colors and diagonal compositions. Poussin was stumbling after Caravaggio while Cezanne was haunted by the demon of a powerful sexuality later sublimated but both discovered that "clarity, order, and rigor" which personalities such as theirs have to adopt as a second or constructed nature.

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In late life Cezanne announced that he was recreating Poussin "after nature", which was strange, since Cezanne, unlike Poussin, painted *alla prima* and without Poussin's 17th century mechanisms (recently deconstructed in David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge) of predrawn "cartoons" and underpainting in monochrome.

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What Cezanne meant, and what is evident in his late work, is a painterly pursuit of three-dimensional composition in space. This is evident when we compare Poussin to David, for David made the neo-Classical mistake of imaging the Poussinesque as a frieze...when the examination, for example, of the painting of the marriage of Orpheus and Euridyce *in situ*, in the Louve, shows a complex three-dimensional drama.

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Just as Mont Ste-Victoire is so clearly, in the late Cezanne, situated beyond the railway cut and bay, the only person in Poussin's painting to actually notice Euridyce's distress is a fisherman, to whom the eye is led in the near background after it travels through a group of wedding guests, arranged not in a frieze but in three dimensions.

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In fact, the painting upon examination turns out to be about Orpheus' failure to "see" Euridyce, a failure echoed in the legend when Orpheus forbids Euridyce to look upon him as he escorts her from Hades.

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In the twentieth century, any number of art critics have suggested that the "analytic Cubist" experiments of Picasso and Braque were founded upon Poussin's example.

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The most famous, but now most notorious, avatar of Poussin's memory in the 20th century was Anthony Blunt. A member of a sort of Inner Ring, the Cambridge Apostles, Blunt grew up in an age of post-Empire weariness but at the same time was drawn, like a number of personalities through history, to Poussin's inwardness and erudition. Blunt became the curator of the Queen's picture collection but in 1979 was disgraced by revelations of his complicity with Soviet intelligence (see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Picador USA 2003).

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This "complicity", as Ms. Carter's research shows, was mostly second-hand in that it included homosexual liaisons with some of the more directly-involved figures but Blunt made no attempt to fight the charges, which resulted in the withdrawal of his knighthood. In fact, the affair as retailed by Ms. Carter has family resemblances to Poussin's experience at court, and would have been comic opera in fancy dress were it not for the stakes involved...including Margaret Thatcher's seizure of power.

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Today, Poussin's paintings rather moulder in dignity in a chamber of the Louvre dedicated to his memory while elsewhere, the go-ahead directors of the Louvre see fit to spend money (that could be spent on cleaning the Orpheus masterpiece) on a chamber dedicated to what American humorist P. J. O'Rourke has called Marie de Medici's "useless life", and a cleaning and restoration of the forgettable moment when Napoleon Bonaparte nicked the crown from the Pope, and crowned himself and then the de Beauharnais woman in turn.

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This spares Poussin, and his latter-day adepts, from having to stand amid people with headphones and others who speculate upon painting, in the matter of the elegant mob which Poussin seems to have despised. We are thankfully left by the still waters of Diogenes and Euridyce to in fact reflect upon human vanity, and when we foregather with others in front of Poussin, we meet not tourists but, at times, fellow adepts.

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