Considered to be France’s greatest 17th-century artist, Nicolas Poussin is chiefly famous for his classical masterpieces. Highly choreographed scenes drawn from the Bible, ancient history and mythology, framed with impeccably realised architectural detail, their stage-set grandeur ushered in the French classical tradition.
However, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, which brings together 40 paintings and as many drawings, is the first dedicated to Poussin’s work as a landscape artist.
Born in 1594 into a poor family in Normandy, Poussin’s education amounted to little more than a grounding in the classics and a brief spell under the tutelage of Quentin Varin, a late Mannerist. After 12 years scavenging for work in Paris, he moved to Rome in 1624 on a commission to illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Reason over emotion
From then on, Poussin would plunder the ancient poets — Ovid, Virgil, Horace — for inspiration. In a city beguiled by the melodrama of Baroque, he embraced neo-Stoic ideals that elevated reason over emotion.
Does the desire to shift canvases at any cost explain the disturbing eroticism of the works in the first gallery? Or was Poussin — whose promiscuous lifestyle left him with syphilis — exhibiting a personal aesthetic?
Whatever the motive, it is hard to see the appeal of the lascivious satyrs and satiated Venuses which people these pastoral scenes. Aside from their hint of depravity, these early canvases suffer from lack of depth, muddy, uneven tones and clumsy brushwork.
The flaws reveal themselves particularly in the pastoral backgrounds. (The figures in the foreground already demonstrate signs of the meticulous arrangements for which Poussin’s works would be famous.)
Nevertheless, later juvenile paintings gesture at the landscape masterpieces to come. The Infancy of Bacchus (1628), for example, is set against cloud-swept skies, lush, looming trees, shade-splashed rocks and a pool painted with reflections — all key ingredients of the landscapes Poussin painted from the mid-1630s.
In paintings such as Landscape with Man Pursued by a Snake (c 1635-1640), Landscape with a Man Scooping Water from a Stream (c 1637), Landscape with Travellers Resting (c 1638-39), we see fleecier skies, loftier trees and gauzier horizons. Suddenly, there is rhythm, cadence, drama; as if one was looking at a painterly snapshot of a play or a ballet with nature’s forms — the arc of a tree branch, a brooding lavender mountain, a path snaking towards the horizon.
hese pictures show Poussin developing the ability to stage space in a landscape just as he was learning to do within his classical oeuvre.
In drawings such as Panorama Landscape with a River and Hills and Upland Landscape with Two Houses on the Plain, both executed between 1635 and 1640, Poussin captures the rolling plains and hills of the Roman campagna with just a few sparse lines shaded by hazy, rapid hatching.
In these pared-down sketches, rather than creating picturesque scenes, Poussin strips the landscape to its skeleton.
It was precisely the absence of that cool, analytical quality that led experts to re-evaluate some drawings once attributed to Poussin. Forming a fascinating sub-section, the G Group, now thought to be by Poussin’s contemporaries, enjoy a charming lyricism thanks to their blurry ink washes and spectacular light- and shade effects, but they also lack the depth and clarity of form that Poussin had mastered.
In the painting Landscape with Saint Matthew (c 1640), the evangelist is shown surrounded by chunks of fallen classical masonry, with the angel standing at his shoulder. Behind them stretches a motionless lake, framed by verdant trees, leading to an angular, golden-grey city huddled against an Olympian horizon.
It is the first time Poussin realises his vision of an idealised, eternal landscape whose contours will, as Joshua Reynolds observed, “send the imagination back into antiquity”.
Improvised Arcadia
As the 1640s unfolded, Poussin’s stylised, classical Arcadias became settings for scenes of high drama: A man is strangled by a snake; Eurydice receives a deadly serpent bite while Orpheus plays the lyre, oblivious.
Often referred to as a “painter-philosopher”, Poussin was renowned for his cerebral approach, yet these paintings are tense with emotion.
The last paintings illuminate Cézanne’s observation that Poussin “put reason in the grass and tears in the sky”.
fflicted with trembling hands that compelled him to dot rather than brush on the paint, Poussin had surrendered to less formal compositions — fruit-dripping, full-leaved trees threatening to overwhelm Adam and Eve; a canopy of indigo clouds eclipsing the Sun as Hagar gazes at the angel; golden corn waving beyond the heads of Ruth and Boaz. Poussin may have been known for his exaltation of reason, but his final landscapes pulse with a wild, elemental, almost pagan energy.
Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions will be on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until May 11. Visit www.metmuseum.org for details.
