The Inspiration of the Poet | |
---|---|
Artist | Nicolas Poussin |
Year | 1629–1630 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 183 cm× 213 cm(72 in× 84 in) |
Location | Louvre, Paris |
The Inspiration of the Poet is an oil-on-canvas in the classical style by the artist Nicolas Poussin, painted between 1629 and 1630. It is currently held and exhibited at the Louvre in Paris.
The painting seems to be the one which was in the Cardinal Mazarin Collection in 1653.
It was given to Louis XIV in 1693, together with its companion piece, A Seaport , by the French architect and gardener André Le Nôtre. It was acquired by the Louvre in 1911. [1]
The painting depicts Apollo, accompanied by infant Cupids and by one of the Muses, about to crown a poet who is writing under his inspiration. It is not known to what the painting alludes, nor what is its exact subject. Perhaps the latter was always indefinite, because the picture appears in Mazarin's inventory of 1653 as Apollo with a Muse and a Poet crowned with Laurels. Its warm colouring reveals the Titianesque strain in Poussin's work; it must have been painted during his first Roman period, at the end of the 1620s. Several other paintings of this period are related to this work: The Inspiration of Anacreon , the Parnassus , and the book frontispiece drawn by Poussin and engraved by Claude Mellan for an edition of Virgil published by the Imprimerie Royale in 1641–1642. [2]
Some critics put forward the hypothesis that the model for the Muse, often recognizable in other works of this period by Poussin, may have been Anna Dughet, whom he married in 1630 at San Lorenzo in Lucina (Rome). [3]
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Nicolas Poussin was a French painter who was a leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a small group of Italian and French collectors. He returned to Paris for a brief period to serve as First Painter to the King under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon returned to Rome and resumed his more traditional themes. In his later years he gave growing prominence to the landscape in his paintings. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained a major inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne.
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Jamais peut-être, dans toute la peinture occidentale, des choses aussi nombreuses et parfois si difficiles n'avaient été dites avec une telle simplicité. Jamais un peintre ne s'était aussi pleinement identifié à l'ordre du monde. Mais cette identification n'est ni « une projection » ni une confidence : là est le sens de cette impersonalité que l'on a pu reprocher à Poussin, et qui fait sa grandeur.
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