Nicolas Poussin: The Unresolved Cadence

Artists fall in and out of fashion all the time, that is the way of the canon, an artist who has been admired in equal measure from their own time to the present day is a rare thing indeed. Nicolas Poussin (1594 - 1665) is one such artist. Lorded by his contemporary Bernini as the only French artist who who really mattered, he won posthumous favour with both Ingres and Delacroix (possibly the only thing on which those two agreed), as well as Cezanne who said he only truly understood himself after spending time with a Poussin. Even the wunderkind of Modernism, Pablo Picasso, was known to copy Poussin’s works.