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Nicolas Poussin worked out his pictures like arguments. He was French, but lived and painted in Rome for most of his life, drawing on Ovid, scripture and the ruins around him. Figures are placed the way a sculptor places them, in clear light, on a stage of trees and stone. The colour is deep and restrained. On a wall, Poussin brings the settled composure of a seventeenth-century room.
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was the great French classicist of the seventeenth century, though he spent nearly all of it in Rome. He read his sources closely, whether Ovid or the Gospels, then staged them with small wax figures before he painted. That method gave his work its stillness. The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus won him public commissions early on. A Dance to the Music of Time and Apollo and the Muses on Mount Parnassus show the mythological side. In his last years he turned to landscape, where weather and light carry as much meaning as the figures.
The range falls into three strands of his work. The mythologies include Pan and Syrinx, Midas Washing at the Source of the Pactolus and the Inspiration of Anacreon. The religious paintings centre on his many versions of the Holy Family, several with the young Saint John the Baptist. The landscapes, Landscape with a Calm among them, bring wide skies and low classical buildings. Palettes run to ochre, deep blue and forest green.
Poussin needs height and a little distance. A large print carries a dining room or a formal sitting room, hung above a sideboard with picture lighting. The landscapes are the easier entry point for a modern home, since the architecture and greenery read well at a glance. Keep frames dark and mouldings simple. Warm white or clay-coloured walls suit the ochres better than cool grey.
Every artwork here is an archival print, hand-framed to order and delivered ready to hang — made in India.
Wall Art
by Nicolas Poussin
