Nicolas Poussin

“ Poussin cursed himself in despair that he should have brought his fair treasure from its hiding-place. The lover over, came the artist, and countless doubts assailed Poussin’s [Pg 1039] heart when he saw youth dawn in the old man’s eyes, as, like a painter, he discerned every line of the form hidden beneath the young girl’s vesture. Then the lover’s savage jealousy awoke.
“Gillette!” he cried, “let us go.” ”

“ No words can do justice to their softness, their precision, their sparkling effect. But they do not lead the mind out of their own magic circle. They repose on their own beauty; they fascinate with faultless elegance. Poussin’s landscapes are more properly pictures of time than of place. They have a fine moral perspective, not inferior to Claude’s aërial 109one. They carry the imagination back two or four thousand years at least, and bury it in the remote twilight of history. ”

“ Poussin accepted the invitation with great reluctance, at the earnest solicitation of his friends. On his arrival at Paris he was received with marked distinction, appointed principal painter to the king, with a pension, and accommodated with apartments in the Tuileries. He was commissioned to paint an altar-piece for the chapel of St. Germain en Laie, where he produced his admirable work of the Last Supper, and was engaged to decorate the Gallery of the Louvre with the Labors of Hercules. ”

“ His partiality for the antique mainly affected his style. "He has left specimens to show that he was sometimes sublime, and often in the highest degree pathetic." Mr Fuseli takes occasion, by contrasting "the classic regularity" of Poussin with the "wildness of Salvator Rosa"—we think unnecessarily, because there seems to be no true point of comparison, and unjustly to censure that great, we may say, that original painter. We have noticed occasionally a capricious dislike in our author to some artists, for which we are at a loss to account. ”

“ We who ask to be moved as well as impressed, who demand satisfaction of the susceptibility as well as—shall we say rather than?—interest of the intelligence, may feel that for the qualities in which Poussin is lacking those in which he is rich afford no compensation whatever. But I confess that in the presence of even that portion of Poussin's magnificent accomplishment which is spread before one in the Louvre, to wish one's self in the Stanze of the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel, seems to me an unintelligent sacrifice of one's opportunities. ”

“ Our feelings alienated from the mother, come too late even for the child, who by his languor already betrays the mortal symptoms of the poison he imbibed at the parent corpse. It is curious to observe the permutation of ideas which takes place, as imitation is removed from the sources of nature: Poussin, not content with adopting the group of Raphael, once more repeats the loathsome attitude in the same scene ”

“ No works of any modern has so much of the air of antique painting as those of Poussin. His best performances have a remarkable dryness of manner, which though by no means to be recommended for imitation, yet seems perfectly correspondent to that ancient simplicity which distinguishes his style. Like Polidoro, he studied the ancients so much, that he acquired a habit of thinking in their way, and seemed to know perfectly the actions and gestures they would use on every occasion. ”

“ Also, "the landscape of Nicolo Poussin shows much power, and is usually composed and elaborated on right principles, but I am aware of nothing that it has attained of new or peculiar excellence; it is a graceful mixture of qualities to be found in other masters in higher degrees. In finish it is inferior to Leonardo's, in invention to Giorgione's, in truth to Titian's, in grace to Raphael's" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 14) .
[74] "He feared the fascinations of colour, and once wrote from Venice that he must flee from a place where they lured him too much. ”

“ Poussin was a most conscientious painter, devoting himself seriously in his earlier years to the study both of the antique and of practical anatomy. Besides being the intimate friend of Du Quesnoy, he was a devout pupil of Domenichino, for whom he had the greatest reverence. It is not surprising therefore to find in his earlier works, such as the Plague at Ashdod, a certain academic dulness and lack of spontaneity. He was not the forerunner of a new epoch, but one of the last upholders of the old. ”

“ The pictures of Poussin are so numerous, and so generally dispersed, that every one, whose attention has been directed to the arts, must have a pretty accurate impression of his style. It is a style of perfect originality, reminding us somewhat of ancient art, but without a tincture of imitation of any modern master. For a short time Poussin sought a model in the school of Titian, but turned from that task to copy the pictures discovered among the ruins of ancient Rome. ”

“ We now turn to Nicholas [Pg 375] Poussin (1594-1665) , the greatest master of his age, whose exalted and lucid conceptions, ripe scholarship, admirable art and fertility of invention, may be adequately appreciated at the Louvre alone, which holds a matchless collection of nearly fifty of his works. The visitor, fresh from the rich and glowing colour, the grandeur and breadth of the later Italians, will perchance experience a certain chill before the sobriety, the cold intellectuality and severe classic reserve of this powerful artist. ”

“ Poussin’s extolled picture of the testament of Eudamidas is another proof of the inefficacy to represent the enthusiasm of sentiment by the efforts of art. The figures have simplicity, the expression energy, it is well composed, in short, it possesses every requisite but that which alone could make it what it pretends to be:—you see an elderly man on his death-bed; a physician, pensive, with his hand on the man’s breast, his wife and daughter desolate at the foot of the bed; one, who resembles a notary, eagerly writing ”

“ To approach Poussin and his younger contemporary Claude rightly, the traveller will do well to free his mind from Ruskin's partial and prejudiced depreciation of these two supreme masters, in order to effect an equally partial appreciation of Turner. [216] The story of Poussin's single-minded and stubborn application to his art cannot here be told. After a life of poverty at Paris and two unsuccessful attempts to work his way to Rome, he at length reached that Mecca of French artists, where a commission to paint two pictures, now at Vienna, for Cardinal Barbarini, established his reputation. ”

“ Subjects derived from Christianity were exactly suited to Poussin, inasmuch as they afforded the sublimest types of that moral grandeur in which{390} he delighted, although we do not see in him the exquisite piety of Lesueur and Champagne; and if Christian greatness speaks to his soul, it appears to do so with no authority beyond that of Phocion, of Scipio, or of Germanicus. Sometimes neither sacred nor profane history suffices him: he invents, he imagines, he has recourse to moral and philosophic allegory. ”

“ Gaspar Poussin (1613–1675) devoted himself to landscape painting and rendered admirably the severer beauties of the Roman Campagna; a noteworthy series of works in tempera representing various sites near Rome is to be seen in the Colonna Palace; but one of his finest easel-pictures, the “Sacrifice of Abraham,” formerly the property of the Colonna, is now, with other works by the same painter, in the National Gallery, London. The frescoes executed by Gaspar Poussin in S. Martino di Monti are in a bad state of preservation. The Louvre does not possess a single work by his hand. ”

“ Soon after he left, Louis died, and Poussin never returned to France. Poussin was always busy; but he asked such moderate prices that he was never rich, and, when a great man pitied the artist because he had so few servants, Poussin pitied him in return for having so many. His portrait painted by himself is in the Louvre, where are many of his mythological pictures. His love for the classic manner makes these subjects his best works. His paintings are seen in many European galleries.
Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) , whose real name was Claude Gelée, was born in Champagne in Lorraine. ”

“ In 1638 a project was suggested to Louis XIII., by Cardinal Richelieu, for finishing the Louvre, and adorning the royal palaces, according to the magnificent plans of Francis I. The high reputation of Poussin marked him out as the person best qualified for the partial execution and entire superintendence of these splendid works; and accordingly a letter was transmitted to him by order of the French monarch, appointing him his principal painter, and requesting his immediate attendance at Paris. ”

“ This scorn for such works of art struck Porbus and Poussin dumb with amazement. They looked round for the picture of which he had spoken, and could not discover it.
“Look here!” said the old man. His hair was disordered, his face aglow with a more than human exaltation, his eyes glittered, he breathed hard like a young lover frenzied by love.
“Aha!” he cried, “you did not expect to see such perfection! You are looking for a picture, and you see a woman before you. There is such depth in that canvas, the atmosphere is so true that you can not distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. ”

“ At last the restless spirit stopped, and turning to Porbus and Poussin, who were speechless with admiration, he spoke—
“This is not as good as my ‘Belle Noiseuse’; still one might put one’s name to such a thing as this.—Yes, I would put my name to it,” he added, rising to reach for a mirror, in which he looked at the picture.—“And now,” he said, “will you both come and breakfast with me? I have a smoked ham and some very fair wine!... Eh! eh! the times may be bad, but we can still have some talk about art! We can talk like equals.... ”

“ At the age of fourteen he went to Paris to continue his studies; and in 1647 he was sent to Rome in the capacity of secretary of embassy to the Marquis de Marueil. His residence at Rome he turned to good account by diligent study of its ancient monuments, by examination of the literary treasures of its libraries, and by cultivating the acquaintance of men eminent in literature and in art, with whom he was brought into contact through his translation of Cardinal Barberini’s Life of Pius V. Among his friends was Nicholas Poussin, whose counsels were of great value to him. ”

“ The absurdity of reducing expression to a preconcerted system was perhaps never more evidently shown than in a picture of the Judgment of Solomon by so great a man as N. Poussin, which I once heard admired for the skill and discrimination of the artist in making all the women, who are ranged on one side, in the greatest alarm at the sentence of the judge, while all the men on the opposite side see through the design of it. Nature does not go to work or cast things in a regular mould in this sort of way. ”

“ The third class, or those who mix up a motley assemblage of ideal beauty and common nature, such as was pounded together by Pietro Testa and Gherard Lairesse, and from which neither Guido nor Poussin were entirely free—though perhaps not strictly chargeable with the absolute impropriety of the first and the lowness of the second class, must be content with what we can spare of disapprobation from either: they surprise us into pleasure by glimpses of character and form, and as often disappoint us by the obtrusion of heterogeneous or vulgar forms. ”

“ Unlike his countrymen, Claude Lorraine and the noble Poussin, who, some years later, were in this same Italy to live laborious and thoughtful lives, Callot freely followed his peculiar vein, and saw in art no more than a means of amusement, in the people about him only subjects for caricature, and in imaginative and even religious subjects but a pretext for grotesque invention. ”

“ Swann's life, from the evening to come, as it would be, after dinner, at her home,—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods ”

“ From the Pincio, Salvator Rosa was generally accompanied home by the most distinguished persons, both for talent and rank; and while the frugal Poussin was lighting out some reverend prelate or antiquarian with one sorry taper, Salvator, the prodigal Salvator, was passing the evening in his elegant gallery, in the midst of princes, nobles, and men of wit and science, where he made new claims on their admiration, both as an artist and as an improvisatore; for till within a few years of his death he continued to recite his own poetry, and sing his own compositions to the harpsichord or lute. ”

“ All set to work and strove to express nature as they saw her; but each saw her through the eyes of a master. In a short time Philippe Dubois had knocked off in the style of Hubert Robert a deserted farm, a clump of storm-riven trees, a dried-up torrent. Évariste Gamelin found a landscape by Poussin ready made on the banks of the Yvette. Philippe Desmahis was at work before a pigeon-cote in the picaresque manner of Callot and Duplessis. Old Brotteaux who piqued himself on imitating the Flemings, was drawing a cow with infinite care. ”

“ Pushkin therefore is not a poet, but only a singer; for he is not a maker, a creator. There is not a single idea any of his works can be said to stand for. His is merely a skill. No idea circulates in his blood giving him no rest until embodied in artistic form. His is merely a skill struggling for utterance because there is more of it than he can hold. Pushkin has thus nothing to give you to carry away. All he gives is pleasure, and the pleasure he gives is not that got by the hungry from a draught of nourishing milk, but that got by the satiated from a draught of intoxicating wine. ”