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| Nicolas Poussin Self-Portrait 1649 oil on canvas (cut down) Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
HISTORY: Painted for [Jean] Pointel, finished before 20.vi.1649 and despatched to Paris 19.vi.1650. Seen by [Gianlorenzo] Bernini in [Jacques] Cérisier's collection in 1665. The Berlin picture comes from the [Edward] Solly collection; bought by the museum in 1821; on deposit at Königsberg for many years as a copy of the Louvre portrait. [Blunt lists eight surviving early copies of the Louvre portrait, all predated by the Berlin portrait.]
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| Jean Pesne after Nicolas Poussin Nicolas Poussin at age 55 ca. 1649-1700 etching (showing the Berlin portrait before it was cut down) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| François Duquesnoy Monument to Ferdinand van der Eynden 1630 marble Chiesa di Santa Maria dell' Anima, Rome |
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| François Duquesnoy Monument to Ferdinand van der Eynden (detail) 1630 marble Chiesa di Santa Maria dell' Anima, Rome |
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| François Duquesnoy Monument to Hadrian Vryburgh 1638 marble Chiesa di Santa Maria dell' Anima, Rome |
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| François Duquesnoy Monument to Hadrian Vryburgh (detail) 1638 marble Chiesa di Santa Maria dell' Anima, Rome |
"It was in the middle of the years under consideration [1643-1653] that Poussin executed his two self-portraits, now at Berlin [above] and in the Louvre [below]. He undertook the task with the greatest reluctance and only at the request of [his most faithful patron, Paul Fréart de] Chantelou. . . . First, Poussin was to have his portrait painted by a Roman artist, but he soon found that there was no one who could do it according to his taste – and this gives rise to come caustic comments on the art of his contemporaries. Finally he decided that he must do it himself. Then, in the process of painting, he became dissatisfied with the first portrait he produced (the Berlin version) and started a second. Finally, both were sent to Paris, one to Chantelou and the other to [another patron, Jean] Pointel, with a letter to the former, telling him . . . that he had no cause to be jealous of Pointel, because Poussin had selected for him the one which was the better painting and the better likeness."
"To our eyes Poussin had little reason to be dissatisfied with the first portrait. It shows him at half-length in three-quarter view, with a black cloak wrapped around him, one hand grasping a chalk holder and the other resting on a book, on the spine of which is written De lumine et colore. (No satisfactory solution has been offered for the fact that Poussin, a firm partisan of disegno, should have chosen to inscribe on the book he is holding the battle cry of his opponents, the supporters of colore.) The oval of the head is seen against a plain rectangular slab of stone enclosed by a laurel wreath of severely classical form which makes a half oval around it. The wreath is carried by two putti, standing and apparently asleep. They are probably funerary genii, and the whole structure at the back is presumably the artist's own tomb or monument, his personal and classical variant of the tombs his friend François Duquesnoy had produced, for instance, in the monuments to Ferdinand van der Eynden and Hadrian Vryburgh in the church of Santa Maria dell' Anima some twenty years before [details photographed above]."
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| Nicolas Poussin Self-Portrait 1650 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
HISTORY: Painted for Paul Fréart de Chantelou; begun in September 1649, finished in May 1650. The despatch of the picture was delayed because the artist's Roman friends wanted a copy made, but it was finally sent off on 19.vi.1650. In 1778 a member of the Fréart de Chantelou family offered the Self-Portrait by Poussin to Louis XVI, but the king did not buy it. The Louvre painting was acquired in 1797 from a dealer named Lerouge by means of an exchange. Everything points to its being the original painted for Chantelou and offered to the king in 1778. [Blunt lists eight surviving early copies of this painting.]
"The second portrait is, however, even more impressive. It is planned on the same principles, but they are much more strictly applied. The head is now seen full-face and erect; the tomb and the putti have vanished and have been replaced by a rectangular pattern of canvases and frames against a door, a sort of abstract of the artist's studio. On the visible part of the left-hand canvas is seen the figure of a woman who wears a diadem with an eye in it, while her two shoulders are clasped by the hands of an invisible person. [Poussin's early biographer, Giovanni Pietro] Bellori tells us that this symbolizes painting and friendship, themes appropriate enough to the portrait executed for Chantelou. (Charles de Tolnay has proposed a different interpretation, but there does not seem to be any reason to doubt that Bellori's is correct.) A further allusion is probably to be seen in the ring Poussin is wearing. This is not the ring which he had caused to be engraved with the figure of a woman holding a ship, based on [Cesare] Ripa's allegory for Confidentia, the word inscribed on the stone. In the Self-Portrait he is shown wearing a diamond cut into a four-sided pyramid. This has been shown to be a common Stoic symbol of constancy, and rings are known dating from the sixteenth century which combine such a stone with the clasped hands of friendship. This would indeed be an appropriate symbol for the relations between Chantelou and Poussin, who wrote to his patron, "I am not fickle or changing in my affection once I have given it to a person."
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| Nicolas Poussin Self-Portrait ca. 1630 drawing British Museum |
"We have one reliable record of Poussin's appearance at this moment in his life, the self-portrait drawing in the British Museum, which, according to the seventeenth-century inscription below it, was made during his illness – that is, just before his marriage in 1630 – and given to Cardinal Camillo Massimi when the latter came to take drawing lessons from him, probably in the late 1630's. It shows a man with heavy features, a thick nose wrinkled at the top, and deep furrows round his mouth, no doubt intensified by illness. It is an unhandsome and unprepossessing countenance, but it has something of the force visible in the later self-portrait, and the eyes show that unflinching integrity which was one of Poussin's most marked characteristics."
– Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, (Phaidon Press, 1958) and The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: a Critical Catalogue (Phaidon Press, 1966)