Nicolas Poussin

The founder of French classical painting and one of the most intellectually demanding artists in the Western tradition, though he spent almost his entire career in Rome rather than France. Poussin was born in Normandy, received basic training in Paris, and arrived in Rome in 1624, where he spent the rest of his life studying the antique, reading ancient history and philosophy obsessively, and corresponding at enormous length with his French patrons about the theoretical basis and specific meaning of every element in the paintings they commissioned. He treated painting as a learned discourse that required the same preparation as a legal argument or a philosophical essay. His subjects were drawn from Ovid, Livy, the Bible and the Stoic philosophers, and they were chosen because they illustrated specific moral or historical arguments. He developed a systematic theory of colour 'modes' — analogous to the modal system of ancient Greek music — in which specific palettes were matched to specific categories of subject: the Dorian mode for subjects of gravity and severity; the Lydian for melancholy; the Mixolydian for the lamentation of the dead. Et in Arcadia Ego (1637–38), with its shepherds contemplating a tomb inscription, is perhaps the most sustained meditation on mortality in the history of landscape painting. His late landscapes — the Four Seasons series (1660–64), among the last works he produced — are suffused with a grandeur and stillness that his earlier work rarely achieves. He made a brief return to Paris in 1640–42 as Louis XIII's official court painter, found the courtly demands incompatible with his working methods, and returned to Rome permanently. His influence on the French Academy (which he never formally joined) was enormous and direct: the classicist tradition he embodied — the primacy of disegno, the moral seriousness of subject, the literary basis of artistic thinking — became the Academy's orthodoxy for two centuries. Cézanne called him one of his two masters (the other was Monet), and kept a reproduction of one of the late landscapes in his studio.