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

Art in America, May, 1995 by Andree Hayum

Central to Poussin's drive toward artistic independence was his insistence on determining the subject matter for his paintings. Thus, certain recurring themes and narrative structures are suggestive of personal preoccupations. Of approximately 40 paintings with Old Testament themes, for example, nearly half treat the story of Moses. Incidents from the Book of Exodus such as Moses striking the rock, the Israelites gathering manna, or the crossing of the Red Sea, afforded Poussin the crowd scenes that he loved to portray; but in conjunction with other subjects, such as the Rape of the Sabines, their depiction of the struggles toward the foundation of human communities surely also reveals the artist's identification with this search for a place where fruitful settlement is possible.

To take a more intimate theme, Poussin was attracted to the story (Exodus: 1-2) of the birth of Moses, which he treated in five--possibly six--paintings and several drawings.(15) Judging by the 1651 painting from the National Museum of Wales, he could use the moment of the rescue of the infant Moses by the daughter of Pharaoh, here flanked by her attendants, to make a statement that is both esthetic and psychological. This striking painting is embellished by a brilliant bouquet of alternating primary and secondary colors marking the draperies. As a demonstration of human reactions that ripple through an all-female cast, the joyful spirit infusing this work presumably also signals the nurturing welcome by the new, "adoptive" mother. Two earlier paintings from the exhibition treat the same subject with more gravity and pensiveness, reminding us of this scene's tragic prelude in the reluctant abandonment of the infant Moses by his natural mother, which Poussin also chose to depict on two occasions.(16)

The artist focuses on the dramatic rescue of an infant boy in other subjects like The Saving of the Infant Pyrrhus and The Birth of Bacchus. But even more interesting is the repetition of the two-mother structure--polarized into a good and a bad mother (The Judgment of Solomon) or envisaged as the jealous conflict of two wives vying for a husband and for the state of motherhood itself (Sarah and Hagar in Landscape with Hagar and the Angel or Juno and Semele in The Birth of Bacchus). Poussin's paintings of the Holy Family are also relevant here. The artist's frequent inclusion of the infant John the Baptist, while itself part of a tradition that gained currency in 15th-century Florence, may have been his pretext for adding--as he did in each case of the infant John's appearance--John's mother, Elizabeth, thereby reiterating the constellation of two mothers that I have identified. We will probably never know what memories and fantasies accompanied the artist's rendering of these particular family structures and dramas. But somewhere in the lineaments of those ancient tales, his own experiences--making his life in a country distant from that of his mother, creating a new family, but one with no offspring--may have their reflections.