The Great Disciplinarian

Andre Gide called him "the first of our great French painters and the most French of our great painters," but France herself has been strangely ambivalent about the 17th century master, Nicolas Poussin. Though his canvases hang in all the best museums, his works have at times been virtually ignored by gallerygoers. And though the experts have subjected Poussin to periodic "rediscoveries," he has sometimes seemed little more than a name to which the textbooks paid their perfunctory respects. This summer Poussin is enjoying his most spectacular "rediscovery" yet, in the form of the biggest one-man show the Louvre has staged in 30 years.

The Louvre has scoured the world to collect 120 drawings and 120 of Poussin's 180-odd known paintings. The U.S. sent 14 canvases; others came from as far away as Australia and from such diverse repositories as Windsor Castle and Leningrad's Hermitage Museum. The Louvre cleaned many of its own 37, often revealing an intensity of color never before suspected. Yet, when the Louvre's chief curator of paintings, Germain Bazin, sat down to write his introduction to the catalogue, he still had his doubts. "Will the crowds," he asked, "show an interest in this artist whose biography reveals a modest life, who assassinated no one, who did not commit suicide?" The "crowds" have been flocking to the show at the rate of more than 7,000 a week.

Cost & Cure. For so French a painter, it is ironic that Normandy-born Poussin did almost all his work outside his native land. After studying anatomy in a Paris hospital, he set out for Rome, where he filled notebook after notebook with sketches of ancient ruins and nearly starved to death. Once, when the Vatican was at odds with Cardinal Richelieu, papal troops tried to beat the Frenchman up. He caught syphilis, and partly to avoid further temptation, married the daughter of the pastry cook who nursed him back to health. The disease left its mark--trembling hands and eventual paralysis--but at 45 Poussin was at last being hailed as France's Raphael.

Through a combination of pressure and promises, France lured him back to Paris, at least for a while. He was made First Painter to the King, was installed in a splendid house in the Tuileries gardens. But within two years, the intrigues and jealousies of Louis XIII's court had driven him back to Rome. And there, in 1665, "overcome with infirmities of every sort, a foreigner without friends," he died at 71. "They preach patience to me as a remedy for all ills," he wrote in his last, despairing year. "I take it as a medicine that costs practically nothing but that also cures nothing."

Head & Heart. It would have taken all his patience to follow his changing fortunes after death. While Delacroix hailed him as "one of the hardiest innovators in the history of painting," others denounced his classicism as cold, almost lifeless. But in an age of facile painters who were more interested in mannered effects than content, he restored discipline and purity to art. "From the hand of the painter," he said, "must come no line not previously formed in the mind." It was a lesson for which everyone from Ingres to Cezanne was to express gratitude.

Nor did his head completely rule his heart. His joy was restrained, yet it is plainly evident in the subdued colors of his Poet's Inspiration. In his Descent from the Cross, his mourners do not quite weep; yet their agony seems all the greater for their control. And when the land scape takes over as in The Funeral of Phocion, it is nature herself who seems to be mourning in a spellbinding scene of grandeur and grief.

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