Talk:Nicolas Poussin

comments
Spinoza1111 04:01, 18 June 2006 (UTC)Tancred et Erminia does not "nicely illustrate[s] his [Poussin's] preoccupation with geometrical composition. It is an evolutionary work in which Poussin was only foreshadowing the geometry of his high and his late styles.

Uid spinoza1111 (Edward Nilges, email spinoza1111@yahoo.com) contributes the section "Historical Reception of Poussin".Spinoza1111 12:44, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Spinoza1111 12:22, 30 September 2005 (UTC)I am re-examining my contributions in light of "bizarrarie" that was removed from contribution to Sleeping Car. I think here that the last paragraph of the article on Poussin winds things up less with POV than with something that conveys to the reader the feeling one has, or is supposed to have, about Poussin. Other views welcome, and edits are unavoidable on this Wailing Wall.

please rephrase
There has to be a better way to express this: "Until the 20th century he remained the dominant inspiration for such classically oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David and Paul Cézanne." I mean, once the 20th century started, did he CEASE being the inspiration for David et Cezanne?--ByronB 02:05, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Spinoza1111 04:38, 16 May 2006 (UTC)Hmm. I really doubt that any reasonably awake student would read it that way. He'd know that David and Cezanne were 19th century artists. Oops: most art students today have their heads checked out and may not know that. I will fix.

Spinoza1111 04:47, 16 May 2006 (UTC)Somebunny already fix and somebunny else removed my Blunt-like, weary, snobbish, concluding remarks about Those of Us who repair to the Poussin gallery to commune with the Master and who flee the madding crowd gaping at Mona Lisa. Oh well. I am quite satisfied to have also expanded the content as to Poussin's influence down to Anthony Blunt.

Nice enhancement to my comment about eroticism. Hot in other words stuff.

Parts of this article on Poussin read disjointedly and certain passages are unclear. Maybe too many cooks have had their hands in the proverbial (editorial) broth or English may not be their first language! It needs a firm copy edit by someone with some time, who has a good grasp of written English and who, preferably, knows something about Poussin to sort out exactly what certain bits are trying to communicate! User: 87.113.28.231 (talk) 15:12, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Vouet
What is the sense in which "Simon Vouet established academic training"? The article on Vouet makes no reference to this.

self-portraits
poussin painted self portraits, in which the subject was taken from after the 12th century. are these to be excluded from the statemenbt under the et in arcadia ego painting?

Spinoza1111 04:42, 16 May 2006 (UTC)Now this is really just nonsense. OK, Poussin painted a grand total of two self-portraits. But he painted NO genre and NO nonhistorical landscapes. Which means that an important fact about Poussin is that he restricted his output mostly to Biblical and classical themes. Earlier paintings also illustrated the popular romance of the time, Jerusalem Liberated, by Torquato Tasso. This forgotten romance was set indeed in the 12 century and concerned the adventures of Rinaldo and Armida during the Crusades. It was also used as a source for some exceptionally silly, but very tuneful and bouncy, operas by Handel but by the 19th century was pretty much unread.

Reading the humanities isn't reading a computer manual. One of the more disturbing things about Wikipedia is that it is, in part, a Visigothic invasion of the humanities by geeks who take things entirely too literally and treat NPOV like a bunch of hysterical Monophysites. This barbarism emerges in da Da Vinci code and as a result sanctuaries like the Paris Louvre are invaded by morons.

Furthermore, Poussin's major self-portrait contains the goddess of painting in the background.

Historical reception
Though I agree with much of what is written here, esp. regarding the relative qualities of Bouguereau and Cezanne, it spins away from assessment of Poussin and becomes an independent and unsourced essay on the currents of 19th century French art. Needs to be edited. JNW 02:03, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I have reverted much of the aforementioned assessment, interesting stuff, but uncited and way off track--with proper sources some of this could be folded into Cezanne's bio. JNW 21:30, 13 October 2007 (UTC) That which I've cut is below JNW 21:35, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

''Ironically, as official French art became standardized with the establishment, under the returned monarchy, the monarchy of the "Citizen King" and the Second Empire, of institutions for the support and normalization of French art, the leading and most successful Salon artists, at one and the same time, apotheosized Poussin while departing from his spirit. Ingres' paintings, while in a superficial polish emulating "Poussin" are far more in the late-Romantic and Orientalizing spirit, combining significant distortion with a photographic sheen that would have puzzled Poussin.''

Bouguereau's nudes and classical-genre paintings give likewise a superficial homage to "Poussin" as a club with which to keep down the canaille but their photographic sheen, again, has nothing to do with the painterly struggles which are evident in Poussins in galleries (which even the best reproductions do not show).

The post-Impressionists were in fact more deeply influence by Poussin.

''Cézanne's artistic career, in fact, somewhat tracked that of Poussin who in early life experimented (with a signal lack of success) in dramatic colors and diagonal compositions. Poussin was stumbling after Caravaggio while Cézanne was haunted by the demon of a powerful sexuality later sublimated; but both discovered the "clarity, order, and rigor" which personalities such as theirs have to adopt as a second nature.''

In late life Cézanne announced that he was recreating Poussin "after nature", which may seem strange, since Cézanne, unlike Poussin, painted directly on the canvas and without Poussin's 17th century mechanisms of predrawn "cartoons" pounced onto the canvas and underpainting in monochrome.

''What Cézanne meant, and what is evident in his late work, is a painterly pursuit of three-dimensional composition in space. This is evident when we compare Poussin to David, for David had the neo-Classical tendency to see the Poussinesque as a frieze; and yet the examination, for example, of the painting of the marriage of Orpheus and Euridyce in situ, in the Louvre, shows a complex three-dimensional drama.''

Just as Mont Ste-Victoire is so clearly, in the late Cézanne, situated beyond the railway cut and bay, the only person in Poussin's painting to actually notice Euridyce's distress is a fisherman, to whom the eye is led in the near background after it travels through a group of wedding guests, arranged not in a frieze but in three dimensions.

In fact, the painting upon examination turns out to be about Orpheus' failure to "see" Euridyce, a failure echoed in the legend when Orpheus is forbidden to look upon Eurydice as he escorts her from Hades.

219.78.60.102 17:33, 3 December 2007 (UTC)Edward G. Nilges: shit. Damn. I wrote that? Damn, I'm good. Sure, it's an interpretation. Boo hoo. It's the best of all possible interpretations wikipedia is gonna get, and back when men like Diderot and Sam Johnson were men and the sheep were nervous, interpretations were found in dictionaries and encyclopedias. The student needs to know at least one good interpretation. This text, minus at least one bonehead error, needs to go back in the article.


 * Thanks for working hard at this, but I'm sorry, we have a load of policies so people can work together. Just have a look at WP:NOR, WP:V and WP:NPOV. They're the core ones. Basically everything needs to be referenced and verified from a sound source. Tyrenius 23:05, 3 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You've stolen my intellectual production and driven me out of wikipedia. I should never have contributed. You don't have policies "so people can work together", you have created a new form of virtual slavery, and I hope to see Jimmy Wales in the slammer for tax evasion, you dig me?


 * Edward G. Nilges...author of the section on Poussin's influence and a number of other texts stolen by wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.102.216.116 (talk) 08:33, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Balzac?
Would it be worth mentioning, perhaps in the "Legacy" section, that Poussin features prominently in Balzac's novella Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu? Sindinero (talk) 11:44, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Might be worth knowing, perhaps in the "get a clue" section, that Zola wrote that and it was about Cezanne, not Poussin. Edward G. Nilges, Hong Kong, come and get me motherfuckers.


 * Are you joking? Sindinero (talk) 08:53, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Asking for a consensus in order to add the external link *A website dedicated to Nicolas Poussin?
My answer following the deletion af the link by TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom : I honestly think that the website linked meets WP criteria, notably the 3 points of "What to link" and the 3rd point of "What can normally be linked" of the WP:EL. Available in French since 2006, the whole site (except the news section - to come) has just been translated in English and now offers an important amount of information about Poussin for English speaking people: his life (and his biographers), his works (notably at The Louvre Museum with many pictures of the paintings and engravings), his bibliography (almost 30 books), his circle... I don't understand your deletion, even if I agree with the principle that Wikipedia is not a farm of links.

What do you think? May we add this external link to Poussin's page? By the way, the thing that should be deleted on this page about Nicolas Poussin is the category "French Baroque painters": Poussin was definitely not a Baroque painter! Thank you for your attention. Guillaumeh75 (talk) 20:15, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems ok to me, though the content is not all that extensive. In English Poussin certainly is French Baroque, just as Vermeer has to be cautiously classed as Baroque. Johnbod (talk) 21:19, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * there is no indication of who is responsible for the content and why we should trust what they say to be accurate and representative. Their biography is based mainly on one source, if we are sending people to external materials, why would we send them to something that has been filtered rather than the main original source? There does not appear to be anything on that site, that if this article were fully developed would not be extraneous to the article. The bibliography and exhibitions are easily found on other sites and so there is nothing unique about the content. And hence it fails on many criteria.--  TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  23:42, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * thank you TRPoD for your remark about the responsible of the site; I've just added the information which was obviously missing. For the rest I of course disagree with you, specially when you say that there's nothing on this site. I won't insist anymore even if I still think you deprive people of an interesting source of information on Nicolas Poussin. Guillaumeh75 (talk) 08:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * as you are connected with the site and have a conflict of interest, your opinions are no longer eligible to be considered when attempting to determine the consensus of whether or not the link is appropriate. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  15:26, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * the publisher of the content Guillaume Horen fails the requirements of being an published expert on the subject. --  TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  15:29, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The point is, we have no existing links that cover this material. Are "the bibliography and exhibitions easily found on other sites"? Depends how good at searches you are, & I liked the selective bibliography. Johnbod (talk) 15:20, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * We are not a linkpharm. We do not have to have external links.-- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  15:29, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * As the EL is not egregious or redundant, I would not have deleted it, but I would not have added it in the first place, either. Ewulp (talk) 02:24, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Ref style
Hey I didn’t mean to change the reference style—in fact, the only thing I like less than the footnote style I thought I was making more complete earlier$undefined$ is an article with three or four different reference styles, which is what I thought I saw before I touched it.$undefined$

Which one should we be using here? Thanks (and sorry) LLarson (talk) 06:17, 15 December 2015 (UTC)


 * You're right that the style was rather messy before your edit. I appreciate the improved consistency, but my own preference is to avoid the templates (which were absent from citations and nearly so in the Reference section), and there were some problems in the copyedits of the text, hence my somewhat peremptory rartial rv. So, which way forward? In the References section the style is pretty consistent except for the two Henry Keazor books; the citations are more mixed but the short citation style is prevalent (to my chagrin my latest edit a few minutes ago muddied things further...) Ewulp (talk) 07:05, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Agree with that - I'm working on a Poussin wiki-Christmas card at the moment, so have my books out & will try to chip in. I don't like sfn templates (or indeed any) either. More refs would be good - I'm sure that: "Thompson, James, Poussin, N., & Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.). (1992). Nicolas Poussin. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art" is fully available on the web as a PDF. Few of the long list of "References" are being used; the rest should go to FR, or just go. Johnbod (talk) 17:48, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

About the list of works
I think that the list of works of Poussin included in one section of the article is redundant, since a more detailed and complete list exists as a separate article. I would propose that it be removed, and replaced by the link to the more complete list. Does anyone have any objections or other ideas about this? Cordially, SiefkinDR (talk) 18:28, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm in favor of removal; an arbitrary list like this isn't adding much. Ewulp (talk) 04:07, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

"Nicolas Po" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Nicolas Po. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. signed,Rosguill talk 22:42, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Length of training with Georges Lallemand?
How long did he study under Lallemand at the time? Loopitywoop (talk) 11:44, 20 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Our source says one month under an unnamed painter "of little talent" who is thought to be Lallemand. I've adjusted the text.  Ewulp (talk) 00:24, 21 May 2023 (UTC)