Works by Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin worked out his pictures with little wax figures in a box left open at one side like a stage, and mostly painted sacred and mythological subjects for a small circle of collectors.

Around 1612, at eighteen, he ran away from Normandy to Paris, where the royal collections showed him engravings after Giulio Romano and, above all, Raphael. From 1624 he lived in Rome, apart from a short spell in Paris in 1640–42 as First Painter to the King. The Death of Germanicus, of 1627, made his name: the general lies dying under a blue canopy, an officer points upward, and a woman at the bedside hides her face in a cloth.

Bible stories and ancient myths are the subject of most works below. By the 1630s his colour had cooled and his figures stood as if on a stage. In A Dance to the Music of Time four dancers, whom his early biographers read as Poverty, Work, Riches and Luxury, circle hand in hand to an old winged man's lyre. In The Judgment of Solomon of 1649 the story is carried by faces and hands: the young king on his throne points both ways, one mother, a dead child on her lap, lunges forward, the other kneels with arms spread.

Later, landscape often became the main subject. Landscape with a Calm, of 1650–51, sets a castle above a still lake that mirrors it, with a goatherd in front and a tree at the right painted leaf by leaf. He drew from nature too, in pen and brown wash: A Path Leading into a Forest Clearing was probably made on the spot.

Sources: Wikipedia, Louvre, Minneapolis Institute of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Wallace Collection.