Nicolas Poussin

Biography

In a letter dating his self-portrait of 1650, Poussin gives the year of his birth as 1593. His biographers settled on 1594: Bellori named only the year, Félibien added June. The parish registers of Les Andelys have not survived, and the customary date of 15 June remains a convention.

He was born at Villers near Les Andelys in Normandy, the son of a veteran of Henri IV’s army and an illiterate prosecutor’s widow. Once he had left for Italy, he kept no contact with his family.

Around 1612, at eighteen, he turned up in Paris. He spent three months with the Fleming Ferdinand Elle, who painted almost nothing but portraits, a short while with Georges Lallemand, and never fitted into the collective work of the studios: all his life he painted slowly and alone. Court papers show debts he could not pay. But Alexandre Courtois, valet de chambre to Marie de’ Medici and keeper of the royal collections, showed him engravings after Raphael and Giulio Romano. Twice he tried to reach Rome: around 1618 he got as far as Florence, in 1622 as far as Lyon. That same year the Jesuits commissioned six large paintings from him for the canonisation of Francis Xavier; they are lost, but they brought him to the attention of the Cavaliere Marino, the queen’s court poet. For Marino he made drawings for Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, now at Windsor: the earliest works of his that can be identified. Marino left for Italy in 1623 and called him to follow. In the parish lists of the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, Poussin appears from March 1624 among the lodgers in Simon Vouet’s house.

The first Roman years were hard. Marino died in Naples in 1625; that same year Cardinal Francesco Barberini left as legate to Spain and took his secretary Cassiano dal Pozzo with him. Poussin, by his own recollection as reported by Félibien, sold battle pieces at seven écus apiece. Gravely ill, he was nursed in the family of the French pastry cook Dughet, and on 1 September 1630 he married his daughter Anne-Marie; her brother Gaspard became his first pupil and took his surname. By then Barberini and dal Pozzo were back. In 1627 he painted “The Death of Germanicus” for the cardinal, from the second book of Tacitus’s “Annals”; in 1628, through dal Pozzo’s influence, he received the altarpiece of “The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus” for St Peter’s and a fee of four hundred scudi. Then came a setback: in 1630 the chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi went to Charles Mellin, and Poussin gave up large public commissions in favour of cabinet pictures for private collectors. For them he painted “The Plague at Ashdod”, “The Empire of Flora”, bacchanals for Richelieu and the first “Seven Sacraments” for dal Pozzo. He built his compositions with wax figures set out in a box open on one side, like a stage. In 1632 he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca.

“The Arcadian Shepherds” he painted twice, around 1630 and at the end of the decade, for Giulio Rospigliosi, the future pope: three shepherds and a woman puzzle over the inscription on a tomb, “Et in Arcadia ego”.

Poussin’s name first appears in Richelieu’s papers in 1638. The negotiations were conducted by Paul Fréart de Chantelou, nephew of Sublet de Noyers, superintendent of the royal buildings; the painter asked for a salary of a thousand écus, as much again for the move, and a suitable house. In December 1640 he was in Paris, lodged in the Tuileries garden, and Louis XIII greeted him with the words: “Now Vouet is caught.” The contract of 20 March 1641 made him First Painter to the King and put him in charge of the painted decoration of all the royal buildings, including the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, more than four hundred metres long with ninety-two windows. Instead he was asked for frontispieces for the royal press, designs for chimneypieces and bookbindings and a ceiling allegory for Richelieu’s study, while Vouet, Fouquières and Lemercier, who had been meant to have the gallery, campaigned against him. In a letter to dal Pozzo of 4 April 1642 he complained that he had been invited without any definite purpose. In the autumn, while the king and court were in Languedoc, he asked leave to fetch his wife and on 21 September 1642 took the mail coach to Lyon; on 5 November he was in Rome. To me it looks more like flight: he took only a travelling bag, without so much as books or pictures for his Roman friends.

In Rome after 1642 the patrons changed: Urban VIII died in 1644, the Barberini left for France, but letters now came from Paris, from Chantelou, Pointel and the Abbé Fouquet. For Chantelou, between 1644 and 1648, he painted the second series of the “Seven Sacraments”, and for him and for Pointel, in 1649, two self-portraits. From 1647 André Félibien, secretary of the French embassy and his future biographer, lived near him and studied with him. In 1655, through Fouquet, the title of First Painter was confirmed. By then his hands were already shaking, and the late drawings show it. Landscape moved from background to main action: in the “Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe” of 1651, under a stormy sky lies a perfectly smooth lake reflecting the trees. In “The Four Seasons” of 1660–1664, spring is represented by Adam and Eve in paradise, summer by Ruth at the harvest. His last canvas, “Apollo and Daphne”, he gave to the future Cardinal Massimi in 1665 unfinished: the figures on the right, around Daphne, were never painted. In a letter to de Chambray of 1 March 1665 he set out his principles, beginning with the statement that “nothing is visible without light”.

Anne-Marie died in the late autumn of 1664. Poussin had his will notarised on 21 September 1665, asking to be buried for no more than twenty scudi; his brother-in-law Jean Dughet thought that indecent and added sixty more. He died in Rome on 19 November 1665 and was buried the next day in San Lorenzo in Lucina, the church where he had married. Bellori wrote the epitaph. The inventory drawn up by Dughet listed about four hundred drawings and sketches and more than thirteen hundred prints.