Art Gallery

Poussin, Nicolas (1594 - 1665). French painter, among the most important of all European painters, worked in France and traveled through Venice before reaching Rome in 1624. Shortly thereafter, he began seeking rigorously composed interpretations of philosophical themes. Except for a royal summons to return to Paris in 1640-1642, Poussin remained in Rome. By staying in Italy, France's two leading seventeenth-century artists, Poussin and Claude Lorrain, who sometimes sketched together in the country, did not join the royal art academy in Paris.

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