The Serene Poet of Painting

Poussin’s Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonne by Christopher Wright Chaucer Press, 2007, $125.

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen;

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2008, $120.

Christopher Wright’s book is the second and much-updated and revised edition of a work which first appeared in 1985. It is the most widely accessible source book detailing the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, who was born in Normandy in 1594 and died at Rome in 1665. It is an attractive, good and useful book and well worth its cost.

Wright only offers us a thoughtful introduction surveying Poussin’s life and works and recording the disagreements on, and changes that have occurred to, attributions of works by this great artist. He also provides chapters on the artist’s early years in Rome, his early maturity in the 1630s, the mature works including the Sacraments series and related paintings, the landscape paintings and the final years. In addition, there are lists of the securely attributed paintings, lost and newly attributed paintings, an informative chronology of the artist’s life, some choice extracts from Poussin’s letters, and a selection of observations by critics. As well, Wright’s detailed chronology and history of paintings and collections is of great scholarly interest. There is also a list of Poussin’s patrons and the works executed for each of them.

Generous plates of some 206 works (nearly all in colour) accompany the text. The quality of reproduction is generally good, if some illustrations appear quite dark by comparison with various other published plates (which was likewise a problem with the first edition). However, as Wright notes, Poussin habitually worked “on a dark ground and some of his pictures have now darkened”. Even so, the reproductions of a few works here unfortunately seem rather too dark: for example, Landscape with the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion and the Louvre Et in Arcadia Ego, although the latter fares better as a detail facing the title page. Colour reproductions in art books cannot be perfect; and turning over the pages of Wright’s catalogue we realise again the tremendous ability and appeal of Poussin as a colourist (and this despite his protestations of the superiority of drawing and line over colour). The luminosity and great richness of Poussin’s colours are immediately apparent in this book; and their impact is all the greater as it is a catalogue that surveys all the known paintings. The rich blues and reds, the golden yellows and the warm flesh tones with carnation pointings—it all serves to amaze one afresh at Poussin’s immense skill as a pictorial artist.

Unlike many other writers on Poussin, Wright is not uncritical of his subject; and he is not afraid to point out, where appropriate, what he calls the “variability” of the artist’s works. The other great virtue of this second edition is that it includes the twenty or so works newly discovered since 1985, with Wright’s comments on them. In particular, there is the remarkable Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus (1626) that is now in the Israel Museum at Jerusalem. The book also notes various major Poussin exhibitions held since 1985. It is worth noting that Plate 87 is the Crossing of the Red Sea, at the NGV in Melbourne since 1949 and recently discussed in these pages; and that Plate 142a illustrates in colour one of the versions of Bacchanal before a Temple (about 1650 and the original of which is presumed lost) being the version “until recently in an Australian private collection”. Wright regards it as being “convincingly faithful to Poussin’s intentions”. It is just possible that another Poussin may be in Australia.

Wright’s discussion of the late landscapes leads us on to the other book, which was the catalogue of the fine and important exhibition “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions” held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at Bilbao in 2008. Its editors are, respectively the President-Director of the Louvre and the Curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan in New York. The essays collected here provide us with a special and privileged view of Poussin’s landscapes (both paintings and drawings and in particular the late landscapes) as being the real and mature culmination of his lifework. They are, certainly, his “testament”.

Early to point out the great significance of Poussin’s late landscapes was William Hazlitt, who in his famous essay “On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin” (Table Talk, 1821) wrote of the Landscape with Diana and Orion (1658) that “Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done” and that Poussin saw “Nature through the glass of time”. Wright and others have justly pointed out that Cezanne’s much-quoted dictum that he wished “to do Poussin again, from nature” carried the wrongful “implication … even if Cezanne did not mean it … that Poussin did not work from nature”. Indeed, Poussin’s surviving drawings of the Roman Campagna (some shown in the New York exhibition and thus illustrated) prove that he did. Wright is surely correct that “Poussin responded to Nature with a serene poetry”; just as Hazlitt had concluded.

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions provides a fine collection of scholarly essays by Poussin specialists of international repute. Pierre Rosenberg’s introduction emphasises the need of a mediator to reveal Poussin. It prefaces several essays: by Anna Ottani Cavina on Poussin and the Roman Campagna, by Alain Merot on the early landscapes, by Claire Pace on the theme of retreat in the landscapes, by Rene Demoris on “The Storm to The Flood”, by Willibald Sauerlander reflecting upon the meaning of the landscapes, followed by Keith Christiansen’s brief biography of the artist. There follows Rosenberg’s catalogue for the exhibition, divided into five parts. Once again here, the 242 illustrations (232 being colour plates of good quality) of paintings and drawings are generous and very well presented. In addition comes a bibliography, a list of exhibitions and an index of works, all of which add up to a highly informative and scholarly volume. The bibliography includes two of Dr John Carroll’s articles in Quadrant.

This book thus provides us with the keys to the significance which Poussin himself placed upon his monumental landscapes, which were that aspect of his art which had such very particular appeal to the most discerning of the English Grand Tourists during the eighteenth century, who were also admirers of the landscape manner of Poussin’s pupil and close collaborator Gaspar Dughet (known as Gaspar Poussin). The debate about to whom the pictures once attributed to the “Silver Birch Master” ought ultimately be given, whether Poussin or Dughet, or another, is also touched on in the text discussion. The New York exhibition was very strong on Poussin’s drawings and a large number of these are illustrated and extensively discussed in the latter part of this catalogue and the accompanying text. Indeed, this aspect of it is revelatory, as it goes further than previous publications.

Wright’s new edition of his Catalogue Raisonne and the Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions are each excellent and worthwhile additions to the growing literature on this artist, interest in whom has been undergoing something of a new spring over the past few years.

Douglas Hassall wrote on Ursula Hoff and Poussin’s Crossing of the Red Sea in the April issue.