The Brooklyn Rail

Nicolas Poussin was an easel painter who lived and worked in seventeenth-century Baroque Rome. And because many of his major patrons were French, he had a very extensive correspondence handling the commissioning, sale, and transport of his paintings. No great seventeenth-century European painter had a stranger career. After moving from his birthplace, Northern France, to Rome, Poussin then turned his back on the Italian art world. His very extensive correspondence, now fully translated and annotated by Klaus Ottmann, records that activity. Traveling from Rome to Paris took about a month. Often the mail was interrupted by political unrest. And so it’s no wonder that Poussin worried, often reassuring his French collectors that the works they had paid for were safely posted. While reading this long book, I was sometimes surprised that there was time left for him to paint. As his constant discussions of money make clear, Poussin was financially dependent upon these distant patrons.

Although Poussin chose to live and work in Rome, the French still claim him as a French artist. Many of his major works are in French museums, while few remain in Italy. But although a few very early works were made on his way to Rome, generally the classical culture of ancient Rome and the Italian High Renaissance were his essential sources. After one early, not entirely successful commission for a Roman church, he took no further interest in the Italian Baroque. With real difficulty he got to the center of the art world, Rome, but then threw away that advantage and worked mostly for French patrons. It took him a while to find himself. Having moved to that center, he chose to develop in opposition to the dominant Roman trends. Some other major artists, Peter Paul Rubens is one, moved between Italy and Northern Europe. And Diego Velázquez, coming from Spain, was inspired by a prolonged visit to Italy. But no other major painter lived in Italy but had his most important patrons in another country. If you look at isolated details in his paintings, you’d be tempted to place Poussin alongside his Baroque contemporaries; reliance upon photographic reproductions encourages that way of thinking. But unlike his baroque peers, he wasn’t interested in decorative, all-enveloping visual environments. That’s why his decorations of the Louvre when in the 1640s he made his one visit back to his native country were a failure.

Like our modernists, Poussin made movable pictures. But unlike most modernists, he never showed contemporary subjects. Apart, that is, from himself, for the two collectors who wanted portraits of him. It’s instructive to compare Poussin to a later painter who greatly admired him, Jacques-Louis David. In his earlier works, David also depicted classical subjects. But then, during the French Revolution, he turns to contemporary themes—The Death of Marat (1793), and then after that, Napoleonic subjects. And so his transitional works, the history paintings from the 1780s, just before the revolution, are difficult to interpret. Some scholars believe that these classical subjects anticipate the Revolution. Perhaps we can also understand Poussin’s history paintings as political allegories. It’s perhaps no accident that three of his great English champions are leftist art historians: Anthony Blunt, Richard Wollheim and T. J. Clark. Poussin was, we can see from his letters, very aware of contemporary events. And so it is arguable that his images of antiquity reflected these concerns. Blunt took up this idea. According to his canonical account, Poussin entertained heterodox religious ideas, which it would have been dangerous to express. Blunt, in turn, also had a double life, as Soviet spy and director of the Courtauld Institute. When he was unmasked, Blunt’s title of knighthood was taken away, but he was not prosecuted. Then, some years after he died, the Courtauld invited me to speak. In the 1930s, I said, when Blunt became a fellow-traveler, the democracies were weak, and fascism strong. And so communism, for all of its problems, offered real hope. But later when many former leftists abandoned the communist party, Blunt was trapped. Maybe that situation reveals something about his Poussin scholarship. Perhaps, I suggested, Blunt was a privileged interpreter of Poussin precisely because he had divided personal loyalties. Alternatively, however, maybe he distorted by projecting onto Poussin his own divisions. I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to choose between these opposed alternatives. (See my “Anthony Blunt's Poussin,” Word & Image, A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, Volume 25, 2009 - Issue 4. And also my “A Very Short History of Poussin Interpretation,” Source, Volume 35, Number 1/2, Fall 2015/Winter 2016.) When I presented this account, a row broke out, for Blunt’s treason was still a live topic. Some people felt that Blunt should have been executed, while others believed it unjust that he had lost his title. Blunt argued that basically Poussin was a secular painter, even when he did sacred subjects. More recently, the converse of Blunt’s interpretation has been presented. A Louvre exhibition argued, rather, that even Poussin’s secular works have sacred themes. (See my: Poussin et Dieu, Brooklyn Rail, May 2015) The interpretation of his austere-seeming pictures is thus linked, still, into contemporary politics.