Poussin peintre - retrospective of Nicolas Poussin, 17th-century French painter - Grand Palais, Paris, France

Art in America, May, 1995 by Andree Hayum

By far the most important artistic event in Paris this season was the retrospective of the 17th-century French painter Nicolas Poussin. One hundred and ten paintings as well as 135 drawings were assembled at the Grand Palais from Oct. 1, 1994, until Jan. 2, 1995, providing the visitor with an incomparable opportunity to assess Poussin's career firsthand.(1) Most, but not all, of the paintings in this exhibition subsequently moved--without the drawings--to the Royal Academy in London, where they were on view until April 9.(2)

The last major Poussin exhibition took place in 1960, inaugurating, as it were, Andre Malraux's cultural ministry. A motivation for that exhibition, which was staged at the Louvre itself, was to ensure, once and for all, a French future for this artist who, according to one writer, was fast turning into "an Anglo Saxon phenomenon."(3) The fact that Sir Anthony Blunt was one of the principal organizers of the 1960 exhibition and, together with Charles Sterling, wrote the accompanying catalogue, was itself symptomatic. Blunt's articles on Poussin had started to appear in the late 1930s; along with his appointment as keeper of the Queen's Collection, he had become dean of Poussin studies after the Second World War. Perhaps even more significant was the dispersal of Poussin's works, many of which had entered English collections starting early in the 18th century.(4) Indeed, by the end of the century, England owned nearly half of his output, and the great French collector Pierre Jean Mariette lamented: "Les tableaux de Poussin sont devenus tres rares en France, les Anglois nous en ayant depouille et continuant de nous enlever tous ceux qui se presentent."(5) Moreover, by the time of the 1960 exhibition, collections across the United States had become repositories for remarkable works by Poussin.(6) After the entrance onto the American academic scene in the 1930s of German scholars such as Walter Friedlaender and Erwin Panofsky, whose writings on Poussin remain fundamental, a generation of American art historians also began furthering the cause of this artist.(7)

But the question of Poussin's national identity goes deeper than the history of taste or patterns of scholarship and collecting after the artist's death. In his own lifetime, we should remember, Poussin became a citizen of Rome. In fact, after 1624, when he was 30 years old, only two relatively unsatisfying years back in Paris, from 1640 to 1642, would interrupt Poussin's Roman residency until his death and burial in the ancient capital in 1665.

The hunger to feed his own talents must have been what drove him to Rome. For when one stops to think about it, who were the role models in France of that period for someone learning to draw and to paint? A few names come up in connection with Poussin's beginnings as an artist, such as Quentin Varin and Georges Lallemant, but there is no real evidence of the circumstances under which Poussin learned his craft in his native country. Nor was it a congenial moment in France for the fashioning of a visual artist's career. It was a time when becoming a painter was not necessarily thought of as an acceptable career choice, if we are to judge by the reported resistance of Poussin's father to the idea. In sharp contrast to the typical paternal support for the talent and training of the Renaissance artist that Giorgio Vasari's biographies unfailingly portray, we learn from Poussin's contemporary biographers that, at age 18, he had literally to flee his family's home in Normandy, first by going to Paris, in order to pursue his chosen path.(8) A picture emerges of the young artist's perseverance in the face of poverty, illness and lack of encouragement that unexpectedly evokes the struggles of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters more than it does the Renaissance masters Poussin is so often thought of as succeeding.

Little is known about Poussin's activities during the 12 years from the time he went to Paris until, after several frustrated attempts, he finally made his way to Rome. But the difficulties of the early years in Rome suggest themselves. For one thing, the city was not yet the shelter for French artists that it would become once the French Academy was founded there in 1666, the year after Poussin died. At the beginning of his stay, grave illness dogged his progress, and his one contact in Rome, the poet G.B. Marino, died the year after Poussin arrived. Still, contemporary accounts speak of his growing collegiality with local artists, especially Domenichino, and his introduction to noteworthy patrons, such as Cassiano del Pozzo, antiquarian and secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, as well as to Barberini himself. Even if, as the sources also convey, the Italian language became second nature to Poussin, on a personal level his Frenchness is not in question. With his marriage in 1630 to Ann-Marie Dughet, the daughter of a French cook living in Rome, Poussin re-created a French family for himself. Twenty years later, the artist includes the word "Andelyensis," referring to Les Andelys, his hometown in Normandy, in the inscriptions on the only two portraits he ever painted--both self-portraits--these, in turn, destined for Frenchmen, Jean Pointel and Paul Freart de Chantelou, who, from the distance of their homes in France, had become the artist's most trusted patrons and friends. Of course, Picasso comes to mind as a 20th-century case where adopted homeland needs to be weighted against his country of origin in measuring the ingredients that form artistic identity.