Universally regarded as the father of French painting, Nicolas Poussin is arguably the greatest of all painters of the French school. Yet Poussin's reputation has been founded more on the intellectual and philosophical qualities of his art than its sheer visual beauty. In Poussin as a Painter: From Classicism to Abstraction, Richard Verdi redresses the balance, describing and analyzing Poussin's outstanding gifts as a pictorial storyteller, designer, and colorist--in short, the purely aesthetic (and often abstract) aspects of his art that have inspired so many later painters, from Turner to C zanne to Picasso. The book features more than two hundred illustrations, the majority in color, and encompasses all aspects of Poussin's art from the mid-1620s to his death in 1665. This groundbreaking study will shed new light on this significant French painter.
"The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (15941665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner, and Ce;zanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1844, 'This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time'. This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin's landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist's early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter's visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon."--Publisher description.
The eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) an enduring source of inspiration, and he returned to Poussin again and again over the years. The ten major essays in this volume constitute his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. 17 illustrations.
Nicolas Poussin, perhaps the most famous French painter of the seventeenth century, lived and worked for many years in Rome. Yet he remained deeply engaged with cultural and political transformations occurring in France, argues Todd R Olson in this original exploration of Poussin's paintings, their production, and their reception. Poussin's references to ancient literature and sculpture addressed a political elite -- the Robe nobility -- whose humanist education in classical antiquity equipped them to relate Greek and Roman history to contemporary events and to deploy ancient precedents in legalistic and political arguments. When the French civil war known as the Fronde erupted in the middle of the seventeenth century, the paintings that Poussin exported to France responded directly in both subject and style to the crisis in monarchical authority and the disenfranchisement of his Robe patrons. Olson demonstrates that Poussin's association with a disgraced political group, his loss of official support, and his exile in Italy imbued his history paintings with a symbolic weight. The painter's audience considered the hardearned pleasures of his restrained, difficult pictorial style a benchmark of integrity as well as a criticism of the Regency's indiscriminate collecting practices and taste for foreign luxury. Poussin transformed the easel painting -- its making and collection -- into an expression of cultural and political commitments binding a community. Olson's fresh insights reveal the importance of this painter's work to a learned and powerful French constituency at a critical moment in French history and demonstrate that Poussin's famously timeless style was far more responsive tohistorical contingencies than has been previously recognized.
Why do we keep returning to certain pictures? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? This investigates the nature of visual complexity, the capacity of certain images to sustain repeated attention, and how pictures respond and resist their viewers' wishes.
This book examines the paintings and drawings of the well-known seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) from a gender studies perspective, focusing on a critical analysis of his representations of women. The book's thematic chapters investigate Poussin's women in their roles as predators, as lustful or the objects of lust, as lovers, killers, victims, heroines, or models of virtue. Poussin's paintings reflect issues of gender within his social situation as he consciously or unconsciously articulated its conflicts and assumptions. A gender studies approach brings to light new critical insights that illuminate how the artist represented women, both positively and negatively, within the framework in his seventeenth-century culture. This book covers the artist's works from Classical mythology, Roman history, Tasso, and the Bible. It serves as a good overview of Poussin as an artist, discussing the latest research and including new interpretations of his major works.
The seventeenth century painter Nicolas Poussin founded the French Classical tradition, working the majority of his career in Rome. He specialised in history paintings, depicting scenes from the Bible, ancient history, and mythology, which are notable for their narrative clarity and dramatic force. Poussin was a man of contrasts; sensual, yet austere and intellectual, prizing reason, order and dispassion above all else. His art is a reconciliation and synthesis of these traits, setting an example of what would become the standard for a long tradition of academic art, continuing until the end of the nineteenth century. His influence was far-reaching, winning the approval of the Neoclassical masters, the Post-Impressionists and even modernists like Pablo Picasso. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing readers to explore the works of great artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Poussin’s complete paintings in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * The complete paintings of Nicolas Poussin – over 300 images, fully indexed and arranged in chronological and alphabetical order * Includes reproductions of rare works * Features a special ‘Highlights’ section, with concise introductions to the masterpieces, giving valuable contextual information * Enlarged ‘Detail’ images, allowing you to explore Poussin’s celebrated works in detail, as featured in traditional art books * Hundreds of images in colour – highly recommended for viewing on tablets and smartphones or as a valuable reference tool on more conventional eReaders * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the paintings * Easily locate the artworks you wish to view * Includes a selection of Poussin's drawings – explore the artist’s varied works * Features two bonus biographies – discover Poussin's artistic and personal life Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting e-Art books CONTENTS: The Highlights The Death of Chione (1622) Bacchanals: The Andrians (1627) The Death of Germanicus (1627) The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (1629) Parnassus (1630) Plague of Ashdod (1630) The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1634) A Dance to the Music of Time (1636) The Israelites Gathering the Manna (1638) Et in Arcadia ego (1638) The Seven Sacraments (1640) Time Defending Truth against the Attacks of Envy and Discord (1641) Landscape with Polyphemus (1649) The Annunciation (1657) The Four Seasons (1660-1664) Apollo and Daphne (1664) The Paintings The Complete Paintings Alphabetical List of Paintings The Drawings List of Drawings The Biographies Poussin (1838) by Arthur Thomas Malkin Nicolas Poussin (1913) by Louis Gillet Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to buy the whole Art series as a Super Set
In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that had been sold as a decorative object in 1986 for around 12,000 euros was acquired two decades later by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for 17 million euros. What does this remarkable story tell us about the nature of art and the way that it is valued? How is it that what seemed to be just an ordinary canvas could be transformed into a masterpiece, that a decorative object could become a national treasure? This is a story permeated by social magic the social alchemy that transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Focusing on this extraordinary case, Bernard Lahire lays bare the beliefs and social processes that underpin the creation of a masterpiece. Like a detective piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery he carefully reconstructs the steps that led from the same material object being treated as a copy of insignificant value to being endowed with the status of a highly-prized painting commanding a record-breaking price. He thereby shows that a painting is never just a painting, and is always more than a piece of stretched canvass to which brush strokes of paint have been applied: this object, and the value we attach to it, is also the product of a complex array of social processes – with its distinctive institutions and experts – that lies behind it. And through the history of this painting, Lahire uncovers some of the fundamental structures of our social world. For the social magic that can transform a painting from a simple copy into a masterpiece is similar to the social magic that is present throughout our societies, in economics and politics as much as art and religion, a magic that results from the spell cast by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. By following the trail of a single work of art, Lahire interrogates the foundations on which our perceptions of value and our belief in institutions rest and exposes the forms of domination which lie hidden behind our admiration of works of art.
