Poussin is first and foremost a composer. And so he almost never works from a model, giving less heed to the counsel of reality than to the instruction of the great masters; “sucking in the milk” of Raphael, his first biographers, Bellori then Félibien say later, “receiving the nourishment and the spirit of Art, as he saw it in the works.” Poussin puts himself voluntarily and deliberately in the train of. … What is it then, what is there in him, that permits Delacroix, so different from him in so many respects, but such a judicious connoisseur, to consider him as “one of the boldest innovators in the history of painting?” What he adds throws light on his thought: “Poussin arrived in the midst of affected schools in which craft was preferred to the intellectual side of art. He broke with all that falsity.”1 Contrary to other painters, and I am speaking even of the greatest, he does not abandon himself to his gifts, does not give them full play. “There is no fine art without consciousness, and consciousness and the spirit of criticism are the same thing,” writes Oscar Wilde. Nicolas Poussin was and is the most conscious of the painters, and that is also where he shows himself the most French. “E un pittore che labora di là,” Bernin said of him, pointing to his forehead. Thought presides at the birth of every one of his pictures.
But just as Mallarmé (who was the most intellectual of the poets before Valéry) could say it is not with thoughts that one writes poetry, it is with words, Poussin teaches us: it is not with thoughts either that pictures are painted, but with lines and colors. Which does not prevent thought from coming to inhabit his canvasses, subordinate colors and lines to it, coordinate them and bring everything into harmony.
He may appear, like Ingres, a drawer rather than a painter; and often the picture may be for him only the putting of volumes into color, for even his drawing remains grouping and composition. The sensuality of the eye may very well guide him, but will never be ruling mistress; reason enthroned will always force her to respect. Dominiquin, the only living painter Poussin did not despise and consented to listen to, said to his pupils, and Poussin likes to repeat it after him: “Not a line should come from the hand of the painter that has not first been formed in his mind.”
But in advancing this delicate truth (so simple that I blush to have to express it) that, by whatever art the artist expresses himself, the craft should be only a subjugated instrument, I shall cause myself to be treated as a vandal, so unknown is it to-day; in our time, so often, that Serva has been made Padron; so often does she reign as despot, and everything else keeps silent before her.
And doubtless I can be moved, as much as by the most expressive figure, by a certain “still life” of Chardin, a dish of plums on a copper fountain, whose substantial gravity, whose devotion to art, is worthy of the meditation of Descartes; doubtless I may even prefer some little canvas of Delacroix, representing the Interior of the Duke de Morny’s Home, I think, or a certain red-hot iron stove, to some pathetic composition where he falls into the declamatory.… I should like to be understood; what I don’t like, is to hear it announced preemptorily.… This is true painting owing to its very absence of a subject; that is seeing painting divested of all spiritual virtue, so as to attach a value only to the qualities of the craft; it is seeing our greatest painters of to-day take care no longer to address themselves to our senses, to be nothing more than eye and brush. This stripping, voluntary omission, will remain, I believe, characteristic of our epoch without a hierarchy, and risks causing it to be judged severely later; yes, all the more severely because these painters will have been all the more admirable because of their craft. It is by their lack of significance that the paintings of our time will be recognized.
While the impressionists, of whom Monet is the most illustrious example in certain of his canvasses or succession of canvasses (I am thinking in particular of his waterlilies or his haystacks), offer us works deliberately decentralized, Seurat, and then in our times, Matisse, Picasso and still many another very important one, like to speak of composition, volume etc.… but the able arrangement of their canvasses remains perfectly gratuitous, independent of all subject. We have seen Matisse work for a long time on the elaboration of certain decorations, returning without respite to the modification of contours, to the skillful equilibrium of the solids.… Yet nothing governed their choice, except the need of filling up space. No spiritual or emotional motive. The work, in order to be real painting, was careful to mean nothing. That idea and sentiment have been deliberately banished from the plastic arts, that painting could have relinquished that immense domain of expression, which nevertheless was its own, and could be its property only, is something that will not fail to cause astonishment later on. And it will matter little if, after that, this domain is no longer inhabited except by the most mediocre painters and the most execrable works. Because he understood only too well that it is with fine sentiments and noble thoughts that the worst works of art are composed, the painter made up his mind not to express thoughts or sentiments at all any more. Moreover this “decerebrated” painting appeals to the need of an impatient public and speculating merchants. All that fits in with the “canned” age.
As I write, twenty examples come immediately to my mind, weakening my assertions. But the critic or the historian, like the painter, can not and should not take into account all the shades and all the lines; to draw is to choose. Have I drawn badly? I don’t think so. In any case, it is Poussin who invited me do better than quote from it, and all the more willingly since the text is little known. Speaking of Poussin, Brienne first mentions rapidly “his pictures a little too nude,” Danae, Galatea or The Sleeping Venus, “and a thousand others of this nature, where the nude is a little too uncovered in view of the correctness and modesty of French manners and customs”; then, in regard to a Venus by Titian, he writes: This picture, although excellent, deserves to be burned, for one could not look at it … without emotion. I should have had it covered with a veil if it had been mine, just as I had Monsieur de Cany cover with a cloth Poussin’s beautiful Venus that caused me so much trouble in the seminary where I am, although this picture, excellent and one that could be viewed by everyone in the state in which it now is, is nevertheless never displayed.” And Brienne adds: “In the homes of the cardinals in Italy, I have seen just as nude and less chaste ones. But in France nudes are no longer tolerated.” Painting, if not pious, or at least austere, had to be hidden.
Let us permit Louis Hourticq to assert: Poussin has “never touched on religious painting except on order and to serve the personal devotion of the giver.” Neither his tastes nor his convictions led him in that direction. Others will notice too that the religious scenes he introduced into painting are among the least moving of his works; he forces himself of our senses; it is profound, durable, and the sort of serenity that I get from it ennobles me. I have only to enact the ideas of Poussin, I wrote; all the same, my reason too is touched here, giving consent to my joy, to the reconciliation of mind and senses in one supreme harmony.
Poussin does not search for that harmony in the expression of felicity alone; he likes to impose it in the tumult; he even obtains it in the horrible in the style of the tragic Greeks, and is not afraid to represent massacres, corpses and plague-stricken scenes. With the result that I doubt there would have been such violent aversion to Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa as Ingres, his younger cousin, was to manifest later.