Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was born at Les Andelys in Normandy and died in Rome, where he spent almost his entire working life. He trained under Quentin Varin, Ferdinand Elle and Noël Jouvenet, worked in Paris, Florence and Rome, and painted for the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo and the poet Giambattista Marino — patrons whose interests shaped his own. Poussin is the central figure of seventeenth-century classicism. He built pictures the way an architect builds: figures arranged with deliberate clarity, gestures legible, emotion controlled rather than displayed. He held that painting should address the mind, and the discipline of that position made him the model for French academic art long after his death. Charles Le Brun, who trained with him, carried it into the Académie itself. Six works here, including the Annunciation, Eliezer and Rebecca, and two of the Sacraments — the series in which his method is at its most concentrated.