The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

The first French artist of a truly international reputation, Poussin is widely considered the Father of the French School, despite his having spent virtually his entire career living and working in Rome. Born in Les Andelys, Normandy in 1594, Poussin had spent his formative years studying in Paris. He chafed at the training he received in the desiccated, late-Mannerist style that still prevailed among the provincial art establishment in France, and at the limitations on his ambition that came with living far from the capital of the contemporary art world in Rome. In late 1623, he arrived in that city at last, upon his third attempt to get there, with the blessing of his influential patron, the Italian poet Giovanni Battista Marino, whose introductions brought him several early commissions for paintings. Unfortunately for the artist, these powerful new patrons – Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the celebrated scholar Cassiano del Pozzo – left Rome for Paris in March 1625 on a 10 months-long Papal Legation. Poussin fell seriously ill over these months and, without ongoing commissions, found himself desperately short of income. He lived hand-to-mouth, moving household several times and selling whatever paintings he made on the art market for whatever he could get for them. Despite illness and poverty, he worked continuously and studied intently the best ancient and modern works available in the city, including Titian’s Bacchanals (then housed at Villa Ludovisi), Raphael’s Stanze and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. He drew from the nude in Domenichino’s academy and took anatomy lessons in a Roman hospital from the surgeon Nicolas Larcher.

Poussin’s severe financial difficulties ended quickly and definitively with the repatriation of his generous new patrons: immediately upon their return from Paris, Cassiano purchased the eccentric painting Hannibal Crossing the Alps Mounted on an Elephant (Private collection) for the considerable price of 40 scudi. It is a painting that Poussin seems to have executed on his own initiative while Cassiano was away, and new commissions soon followed its purchase. It was around this time that Poussin painted the first of his poetic, Titianesque mythologies and scenes from the life of the Holy Family, almost certainly including the present painting. This tender, beautifully observed, small-scale panel is likely one of the pictures that the artist made to sell in the marketplace during or shortly after his financial crisis.

This Rest of the Flight into Egypt was first identified as an early work by Poussin by Konrad Oberhuber in 1988 in the catalogue that accompanied the landmark exhibition Poussin, The Early Years in Rome (Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, op.cit.). Known only from a photograph made when the painting was in the collection of Vitale Bloch, Oberhuber dated the painting to 1626, less than two years after Poussin’s arrival in Rome. Perceptively, Oberhuber compared the painting to the works of the great Venetian Renaissance masters that the artist had been studying closely since his arrival in the Eternal City in 1624 – notably Titian – as well as to pictures by current Roman painters such as Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661) and Giovanni Lanfranco (1580/82-1647). ‘Poussin, in this period enjoys the painterly virtuosity of his Italian colleagues, a kind of bravura inherited from the Venetians,’ Oberhuber notes. The present Rest on the Flight into Egypt, he continues, ‘shows [just] such quick evocations of form and open touches of the brush. Poussin depicts a loving mood between mother and child in a luminous, deeply coloristic world that seems more and more to become his own. As his brush proves bolder, he gives up some of the delicate dotting that he used to create foliage or grass, and he gives mountains and grassy ledges sharper profiles. The paint is still opaque and put on with a heavy impasto, but we already find thin glazes in the bodies. These glazes will begin to characterize Poussin’s works.’ Painted on an unusual oak support that the artist chose, presumably, to enable a smoother, more refined finish to the work, it was executed quickly and fluently, with few changes of mind and little reworking. The romantic, richly coloured landscape – with its dramatic sunset and autumnal foliage gently lit by its dying rays – strongly recalls Titian and is nearly identical in conception and handling to that found in Poussin’s almost exactly contemporaneous Venus and Adonis (View of Grottaferrata) (Montpellier, Musée Fabre; fig. 1).

Upon the picture's re-emergence at the sale in Monaco in 1993, scholars were able to see the work in person for the first time and affirm Oberhuber's opinion, with Sir Denis Mahon decisively confirming the attribution in his 1993 sale catalogue entry. Pierre Rosenberg first affirmed the attribution in the catalogue of his definitive exhibition Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665, held at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1994/5, and more recently confirmed its inclusion in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Poussin’s paintings.