The Brooklyn Rail

In his introduction to this English translation of Nicolas Poussin’s letters, Klaus Ottmann describes these as among the “rarest and most unique documents of Western art history.” He is not wrong in this, but it takes an informed and contextual reading to understand why. The documents are rare because few artists working before 1700 wrote such a body of letters, and few collections of them have survived. Poussin needed to write letters to his patrons in France (most notably Paul Fréart de Chantelou) when he was in Italy, and to those in Italy (especially Cassiano dal Pozzo) when he was in France. The original letters to Chantelou were lost between around 1796 and 1857 but then purchased for the French state. The letters to Cassiano dal Pozzo were sold and dispersed in 1823, but their locations are now known for the most part. The only comprehensive publication to date remains that of Charles Jouanny, whose Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, was published by the Société de l’histoire de l’art français in 1911, and it is upon this volume that Ottmann relies for the most part.

The claim of uniqueness challenges us to think beyond Poussin. The most obvious comparative example is Michelangelo, from whose hand we have some five hundred letters, and whose total correspondence amounts to some 1,400 items. Poussin’s letters number around two hundred, and we lack all the letters written to him. I find the comparison with Michelangelo’s letters instructive. Written in his own beautiful hand, mostly from Rome to Florence and Tuscany, they often deal with family and friends in an intimate and everyday way, talking as much about farming and provisions, property and marriages, feelings and frustrations, as about commissions. Though Michelangelo wrote elegant and sophisticated poetry, and was often dealing with the powerful, his letters are not those of a humanist or courtier: he told his brother Giansimone that reading a letter was like talking and begged him to write more often. Poussin had a humanist education, was fluent in both Italian and French, and lived in a courtly environment in which the formalities of hierarchy needed to be observed. When it took three weeks for a letter to go from Paris to Rome, it was important to avoid misunderstandings, though they often occurred anyway. Jonathan Unglaub made the important discovery that one of Poussin’s deepest letters of apology to Chantelou in 1642 was in fact lifted from a writing manual by Du Tronchet published in 1572. But this by no means implies that the sincerity and directness that characterizes Michelangelo’s private letters are missing from Poussin’s, where friendship, business, politics, and respect for the social order are intimately intertwined.

We can understand Poussin’s embrace of Stoic detachment from his paintings, but the connection is made more profound through the letters in which the artist writes of seeking well-ordered things, fleeing confusion, looking for repose and tranquility, while observing the events of his time as a bystander. He insists that everything we have, we have on loan, and he is consistently modest about his work, writing to Chantelou the Elder that he has painted a work for him, paraphrasing Michel de Montaigne, “as I could, not as I wished.” The painting is, in other words, an essay. There are moments of real temper when he feels misunderstood, even calumniated, as in the case of discussion of his failure to return to Paris, and he is not afraid of speaking his mind about the weakness of other painters, mainly French. He writes about his own illnesses, often having to explain the lateness of his completion of a commission. Especially revealing in light of current interest in mobility and the movements of works of art is the extensive information the letters provide about Poussin’s activities as an agent, finding, commissioning, packing, and shipping other works of art (not to mention perfumed Frangipani gloves) between Rome and Paris. The accounts rendered by Poussin to Chantelou between 1643 and 1648, included by Ottmann, as they were by Jouanny, constitute a gold mine of information on all these topics.

Poussin’s two hundred letters, written between 1630 and 1665, can be mined for dates of works of art, their commissioning, and other particular art historical facts. But read as a whole body of one man’s continuing expression of his reasons and his passions, they provide extraordinary insight into the character of a great artist for whom Montaignian self-reflection and the respectful ties of mutual friendship mattered more than fame or fortune.