However, of all those who “made a profession of mute things,” there is not one whose works, as much as those of Poussin, extend beyond the interest in painting alone and which, for their noteworthy success, have made appeal to qualities and virtues rising far above the exclusive merits of the brush.
During Poussin’s life as well as long afterwards in order to praise his canvasses, they pointed out (even men of his trade) only their intellectual merits, and discussed reasonably to their wits’ end the why and wherefore of those merits. Better advised to-day, perhaps, we know that those merits, however extraordinary they might be, would not have sufficed to assure Poussin a lasting reputation, to permit his canvasses to pass into distant times and to come down to us. In the great shipwreck of time, it is by their skin that masterpieces float. The same for literature. Without the inimitable beauty of his prose, who would still be interested in Bossuet?
I shall go further: intelligence even risked holding Poussin back, as often happens. Here the miracle is that Poussin was painter enough, was a great enough painter, so that the container, under the excessive weight of what it contained, did not go under; so that the idea triumphant could dominate the matter while glorifying it. And that is because, in him an idea immediately became an image, was born plastic, and that here the intention, emotion, form, craft, everything converged on and conspired for the work of art. With the result that what Barbey d’Auvevilly wrote of Baudelaire could be said of him: “Following that struggle with the angel, the artist was not too defeated.”
That Poussin is a painter, a great painter, a born painter, we would be sufficiently convinced by one of his mythological canvasses, not cluttered up with meaning, representing a naked nymph, or some sleeping Venus, and responding only to what Poussin proclaimed to be the aim of art: delight. But these canvasses in his first style, scattered over Europe, are relatively little known. Likewise, when it was granted us, at the time of a great exposition, to see in Paris a certain work of Poussin that had been lent to us: Tancrede and Hermione or The Inspiration of Anacréon, it was a dazzling revelation for many of the French. What! Poussin capable of such discreet splendor, of that gleaming, blended enamel, of that sumptuous symphony? Who would have thought it after his classic and too sober masterpieces in the Louvre?
Now, having once tasted easily that jubilation, that sensorial rapture, we shall know how to find it again even in his last canvasses, however tempered they may be by the monotonous patina, and cooled off too, accustomed as we are to them. At any rate, of less flagrant sensuality, they require of us, to be affected and to affect us, a very vigilant attention, a prolonged contemplation.
Moreover, to persuade us, there is nothing better than those fragmentary, photographic representations — where, leaving behind the harmonious vision of the whole, we can evaluate in a leisurely way the sensibility of the touch, its firmness, its fullness; and it is with a sort of particular intoxication that we admire from then on the essentially pictorial qualities of the innovator, by which he overtakes certain of our boldest pioneers of to-day.
Let us get down to Poussin.
I don’t have to expound on his biography. I shall note only that he was about eighteen when he made his first fillip at the doctrine of Barrès, at the attachment to “the land of the dead.” As soon as he “thought he was in a position to leave his native region,” writes Félibien in 1685, “he left his father’s home (in Andelys) without making any stir, and came to Paris to learn more about an Art whose difficulties he already recognized, but which he loved passionately.” And a few years later, it is France itself that he leaves for Italy. During his first trip, his means and circumstances did not permit him to go further south than Florence. But the second time, making a greater leap, in the spring of 1624, he reached Rome, where he settled down and blossomed forth. Nevertheless, an especial appeal from Louis XIII recalled him to Paris where important charges were entrusted to him, accompanied by extraordinary advantages. “Now,” remarks Félibien, “whatever charms might have retained him in Italy, it would have been very awkward for him not to obey the orders his King deigned to give him” (in January 1639). Still he only answered him with very bad grace, procrastinating until the very end of 1640, until the extreme limit of propriety. Then, as soon as he could, breaking all his engagements, he settled again in Rome (in September 1642) which he never again left until his death (November 19, 1665). The scrupulous Paul Desjardins feels justified in writing: “There is not a trace in Nicolas Poussin’s letters of any obligation that he might have felt toward his parents. Never afterwards does he show any regret at being separated from them; transplanted voluntarily to Rome, he lost all desire to return, it could even be said all memory.” The first of our great painters, and the most French of our great painters was the type par excellence of the uprooted person. Others are almost as much so, and among them Claude Gelée from Lorraine; but no one more advisably than he. Yet it is the spirit and genius of France that can be felt breathing in his canvasses and that he illustrates in a different way, but just as much as Descartes1 (that other great up-rooted one) and Corneille2, his contemporaries.
The three portraits (by himself) that we have, of 16223 and of 16304 present to us a Poussin dictatorial and a little grumpy. The severity of his features is not softened by any desire to charm. In the little sanguine in the British Museum5 Poussin accentuates the disdainful twist of his lips that, as early, as the portrait of 1622, one felt little made for smiling, and the frowning of his eyebrows over a sharp and inquisitorial look where, in the first portrait, can be read above all interrogation and expectation. In the celebrated and more conventional portrait in the Louvre, he attains a sort of gloomy serenity. With such a face, he can readily be imagined “young or old, always alone in his studio.”6 In spite of the great influence exercised by him, he never formed any disciples; neither had he been the pupil of any master. It might be said that something was lacking because he had not served the apprenticeship of his trade; but the very defect in his virtuosity and the slowness of his hand preserved his secret value.
Malraux affirms with wide-awake perspicacity that the first creative impulse of any painter is never given directly by nature, but by some preceding work in which nature has already been interpreted; that without Cimabué there would never have been a Giotto; with the result that one can go back in this way to the graffito of the caves, those traced for the purposes of magic. For no painter is this determination truer than for Poussin. Most certainly the external beauty of the world did not leave him insensible, but it was in contact with works of art that he became conscious of his vocation. Self-taught, he put himself, when young, into the school of the ancients, bas-reliefs and statues, copying them in preference to animated or “still” life; then under the great Italian painters, of Raphael especially, whose works, moreover, he knew for a long time only through engraved reproductions. And just like Ingres later, he could have said: “My works recognize no other discipline than that of the ancients, the great masters of that century of glorious memory, when Raphael defined the eternal and incontestable limits of the sublime art. I think I have proved in my pictures that my only ambition is to be like them and to continue art on taking it up where they left off.”