Nicolas Poussin: 11 works

'Nicolas Poussin spent most of his career in Rome and was the prime inspiration for the classical revival in French art.'

'Poussin drew on Roman antiquity for the form as well as the subject of this painting.'

'Early in his career Poussin traveled to Italy and was introduced to a circle of important Roman patrons including the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo.'

'He based the composition for this drawing on an engraving by Marcantonio Raimoni after Raphael's Parnassus fresco in the Vatican, placing the figure of Apollo to the left of the center.'

'He made this study and at least five others in preparation for a painting commissioned by a member of an illustrious Italian family prominent in government and civic affairs and active patrons of the arts.'

'He commonly copied ancient objects in his drawings, using these careful records to add authentic details to his classicizing paintings.'

'From the ancients Poussin developed his theory of the Modes, the idea that expressive devices should correspond to the content of a work.'

'He executed the draped torso and the sandaled foot with a similarly spare technique and attention to structure. He might have sketched the mirror from life, as it may have been in a Roman nobleman's collection, and he probably sketched the tripod in the upper left corner after a drawing in another collector's "Paper Museum."'

'In one of his most masterly ordered landscapes Poussin offsets the classical city's calm but severe grandeur against the tense foreground in which the widow's companion appears to sense the spying youth hidden in the nearby grove.'

'X-ray examinations show that the canvas was first used for a partial copy of Poussin's Moses trampling Pharaoh's Crown, now in the Louvre.'

'(Josephus Flavius, The Jewish War, VI.5--6) This work from Poussin's early Italian period was commissioned by his patron Cardinal Francesco Barberini and offered as a gift to Cardinal Richelieu, the French head of state.'