Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (Metropolitan Museum of Art) [Hardcover]

Mr. Keith Christiansen et al. (Editor), Professor Pierre Rosenberg (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Metropolitan Museum of Art | Publication Date: March 3, 2008

The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner, and Cézanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1844, “This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time.”

 

This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin’s landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist’s early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter’s visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon.

 

(20080301)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This beautifully illustrated catalogue contains essays by a half-dozen scholars who present an authoritative look into Poussin's landscape paintings. Highly impressive."-Art Times (Art Times 20080501)

"The quantity and superb quality of the color plates is typical for this publisher."-Reference & Research Book News (Reference & Research Book News )

About the Author

Pierre Rosenberg is a member of the Académie Française and Honorary President-Director of the Musée du Louvre. Keith Christiansen is Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art; 1ST edition (March 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300136684
• ISBN-13: 978-0300136685
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #922,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars with Cezanne, the greatest of all French painters?, August 19, 2009

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Ivor E. Zetler (Sydney Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (Metropolitan Museum of Art) (Hardcover)

Pierre Rosenberg makes the bold claim that Poussin is, together with Cezanne, the greatest of all French painters. Andrew Butterfield in NYRB describes the Metropolitan exhibition as "ravishingly beautiful' and speaks of "magical paintings of unforgettable affective power". Jed Perl in the New Republic asserts that this epochal exhibition "took us deeper into the inexhaustibly complex relationship between nature and culture than any other".

This catalogue will give the reader an idea of what all the fuss is about. The first third of the book consists of erudite essays concerning Poussin's landscapes. The balance is a description and discussion of the 113 paintings and drawings that were on show at the Met. This latter task is left to Pierre Rosenberg, a leading authority on French drawings and paintings.

I strongly recommend this quality publication. The many illustrations are excellently reproduced and the accompanying text is unfailingly interesting. It offers some consolation to those that missed this famous exhibition and a serves as a joyous reminder to those who were lucky to have attended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Presentation, August 29, 2009

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Dominic Finocchio (Missouri) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (Metropolitan Museum of Art) (Hardcover)

Scholarly yet highly readable essays written by a variety of historians accompany a generous amount of high quality color illustrations. The objective of this exhibition catalog seems to be the hope of expanding Poussin's reputation as an erudite history painter to include a real sensitivity to nature and his ability to turn studies from life into highly structured pictorial statements that have as much to say about the narrative as do the figures. Adding to my personal pleasure in this book is the fact that many of the works shown are lesser known, including a number of early works, which encourages a fresh look at Poussin. I recommend this book to anyone who cares about art history, but if you like Poussin, it is a must. The exhibit for which this catalog was written took place in late 2007 into the first half of 2008 and was on view in two venues.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing format, June 14, 2011

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A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (Metropolitan Museum of Art) (Hardcover)

I can't yet comment on the essays in the book, but the illustrations are disappointing. Not for the quality of the printing (which seems excellent, so far as I can judge), but for their size. Poussin's canvases are filled with detail, and seem much bigger than their actual physical dimensions. Production choices by the publisher have turned these virtues into a source of uncomfortable constraint. I compared this with another book from Yale, Michael Levey's monograph on Tiepolo, which feels much more expansive than this one even though Tiepolo's paintings were huge. Had YUP used the same form-factor (just 2 cm wider), and bled more illustrations to the margins as they did in the Tiepolo book, the Poussin illustrations could have been 1.5x-2x the size. (This book does have some fully-bled details, but that's not the same as seeing the whole picture.) Many of Poussin's canvases are like windows onto another world; this illusion would be stronger if the reproductions were to go all the way to the edges of the page. The book is nicely bound, and lies flat, so this wouldn't impair readability. Maybe one could defend leaving white margins around the reproductions, on grounds that they emphasize the small size and finiteness of the original canvases; but then making the book slightly wider would have been the least the publisher should have done. For those who saw the original show, this may be a wonderful souvenir of their lived experience. But since I neither was so fortunate, nor have the eyesight of a teenager, in lieu of nostalgia I feel frustration at missing so much of what's going on in each canvas.

[POSTSCRIPT 2011/11: I received an email asking for more specifics about the size of the reproductions. The canvases that were in the original exhibition are printed with a width of up to 19.7 cm (some slightly less); the height varies with the size of the original canvas, but the larger ones were about 14.5 cm. So the biggest area is not quite double (about 187%) that of a typical picture-postcard, such as one I recently received from overseas. This may sound generous, but if you're past age 45 or so you'll need good eyes to see the details without a magnifying glass: Poussin is not Barnett Newman. As is typical in scholarly art history books, there are some other pictures (other works by Poussin, or by his contemporaries or antecedents) reproduced in the margins of the historical essays, about 8.5 cm wide. While in some books these supporting illustrations would be in black & white, happily they're in color here.]