French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665 French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response,  Related Paintings of POUSSIN, Nicolas :. | Acis and Galatea stg | Summer (Ruth and Boaz) | The Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem afg | St Cecilia af | The Triumph of Neptune sg |
Related Artists:
Theodore Butler
1861-1936
Franqois Balthazar Solvyns
1760-1824
Salomon de Caus
b France, 1576; bur Paris, 28 Feb 1626,He was a Huguenot from the Dieppe region (Normandy). Between c. 1595 and 1598 he visited Italy, where he was strongly influenced by the gardens laid out c. 1570 by Bernardo Buontalenti at Pratolino, near Florence, and by their mechanical artifices. De Caus's work also reveals a knowledge of the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli. From c. 1598 to 1610 he was in Brussels, in the service of the Stadholder of the Netherlands, Albert, Archduke of Austria. There he was the engineer responsible for wells, fountains and the automatic works in the two grottoes (destr. 1768) in the garden of the Stadholder's residence. From 1610 he lived in England, moving in the artistic circle of Henry, Prince of Wales, to whom he taught drawing and for whom he built a picture gallery at Richmond. Together with Constantino de' Servi (1554-1622) he was engineer and supervisor of the waterworks at Richmond Palace. De Caus dedicated his first book, La Perspective (1612), to Prince Henry and included garden designs for the Prince in his second book, Les Raisons des forces movvantes (1615). He worked at several sites in England, including Somerset House in London, where he is thought to have erected a Parnassus, and at Greenwich Palace, Hatfield House and Gorhambury House (Herts) and Wilton House (Wilts). Nothing has survived of his work of this period.