on its publication, its satire on political and
fallen rapidly into public neglect, despite being adapted by for a mini-series in ,
coal fire. This reminds him of the ancient world - legionaries ( ) mountain altars
school which open . Over the course of the following twelve volumes, he recalls the people
he met over the previous half a century.
Little is told of Jenkins personal life outside
his encounters with the great and the good, with events, such as his wife s miscarriage,
only being related in conversation with the principal characters.
the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing
outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard
plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward
like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically
sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into
seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once
more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to
control the steps of the dance.
Poussin was the founder and greatest practitioner of French classical painting. His work symbolizes the virtues of clarity, logic,
and order. It has influenced the course of French art up to the present day.
ordered him back to France as Painter for the King.
in . Early sketches attracted the notice of , a local painter, whose pupil Poussin
became, till he went to , where he entered the studio
apprenticeship system was disturbed, and the destined to supplant it were not yet established; but, having met the ,
after Italian masters.
illustrations to his poems, took him into his household, and in
Rome. There, his patron having died, Poussin fell into great distress. Falling ill he was
nursed by his daughter Anna Maria to whom, in , Poussin
was married.
whom in Poussin, at the call of , returned to France.
painter in ordinary, and in two years at Paris he produced several pictures for the royal
the series of the Labors of Hercules for the Louvre, the Triumph of Truth
for Cardinal Richelieu (Louvre), and much minor work.
to Rome.
There, in , he finished for the second series of the Seven
Year by year he continued to produce an enormous variety of works, many of which are
on November 19, 1665 and was buried in the church of St Lawrence in , his wife having predeceased him.
Poussin left no children, but he adopted as his son (Gasparo Duche), his wife s brother, who took the name of Poussin.
the Louvre; but, besides the pictures in the National Gallery and at Dulwich, possesses several of his most considerable works: The
At Rome, in the and s, are notable works by him, and
distemper.
Throughout his life he stood aloof from the popular movement of his native school. French
art in his day was purely decorative, but in Poussin we find a survival of the impulses of
classic work as the standard of excellence. In general we see his paintings at a great
disadvantage, for the color, even of the best preserved, has changed in parts, so that the
engravings than in the original.
Amongst the many who have reproduced his works Audran,
Claudine Stella, Picart and Pesne are the most successful.
Poussin was a prolific artist, some of his many works are:
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.
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
death after securing British domination of North America. Subsequently many military
sure the strategic situation, or role of the favored individual, was highlighted properly
in an era when people learned facts from paintings.
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.
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.
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.
powerful sexuality later sublimated but both discovered that clarity, order, and
nature.
which was strange, since Cezanne, unlike Poussin, painted *alla prima* and without
underpainting in monochrome.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
complicity with Soviet intelligence (see Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Picador
This complicity , as Ms. Carter s research shows, was mostly second-hand in
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.
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
American humorist P. J.
O Rourke has called Marie de Medici s useless life ,
the crown from the Pope, and crowned himself and then the de Beauharnais woman in turn.
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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