French artist Nicolas Poussin He was born on June 15, 1594 in Les Andelys, Normandy, near Rouen, where he studied with the artist Quentin Varin. After moving to Paris in 1612, he worked in the studios of Georges Lallemant and Ferdinand Elle. During his years in Paris, Poussin saw works and prints by Raphael and Giulio Romano, High Renaissance artists, who would continue to inspire him throughout his career.
Poussin he made two unsuccessful attempts to visit Rome, in 1617 and in 1622. In Paris he met the poet Giovanni Battista Marino in 1622, who probably facilitated the painter’s trip to Rome in 1624. Except for a brief return to France in 1641-1642, Poussin he remained in Rome for the rest of his life.
His early years in Rome are not sufficiently documented to provide a clear chronology of his works. It is known that this period was fraught with difficulties, but that it also quickly found a place within the artistic circles of Rome. He studied for a time with the classicist Bolognese painter Domenichino. Through Marino he met the collector Marcello Sacchetti and received two important commissions from Cardinal Francesco Barberini, The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem Israel Museum) and The Death of Germanicus (Minneapolis Institute of the Arts). In 1628, Poussin received his first and only public commission in Rome, an altarpiece for the newly built St. Peter’s Basilica depicting the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (Vatican City, Vatican Museums).
Even if Poussin now finding his first recognition, he continued to experiment, especially in the 1620s and 1630s, with a variety of stylistic expressions. His knowledge of Venetian painting had already left its mark on the luminosity and vibrant coloration of his Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus Y The Assumption of the Virgin (National Gallery of Art) and would also be expressed in some of his most beloved paintings of these years, such as The inspiration of the poet, (Paris, Louvre Museum) and the Flora Empire inspired by Ovid (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie).
He was appointed First Painter to the King and took charge of the decoration of all the royal residences, his main responsibility being to paint the decoration of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. This type of large-scale project, which required numerous assistants, was not pleasant to Poussin, and on the pretext of bringing his wife back, he requested permission to return to Rome in 1642. The deaths of Richelieu in 1642 and of Louis XIII in 1643 they followed shortly, halting all progress in the enterprise, so that Poussin was able to remain in Rome.
The second phase of his career was dominated by French bosses. Between 1644 and 1648 Poussin painted for Paul Fréart de Chantelou a second series of The seven sacraments (Duke of Sutherland, on deposit at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). Around 1648, he turned his attention to landscapes, a genre he had explored at the turn of the century. His interest in human passions carried over to works such as Focion’s funeral (Cardiff, National Museum of Wales) and Landscape with the ashes of Focion (Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery), 1648.
The Sagrada Familia on the stairs (Cleveland Museum of Art) is representative of the practice of Poussin to return to a specific topic for several years. Between 1635 and 1657 he completed more than a dozen paintings dedicated to the theme of the Holy Family.
The final preeminent achievement of Poussin it was his series The four Seasons (Paris, Musée du Louvre), painted for the Duc de Richelieu, the cardinal’s great-nephew, which merged the genres of landscape and allegory. A canvas with much in common with The Four Seasons, the Apollo and Daphne (Paris, Musée du Louvre) was the final work of Poussin, which he left unfinished due to the instability of his hand, dedicating it to Camillo Massimi in 1664, a year before his death. Poussin he was buried at San Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome.