The only man who can compare with him for the gift of absorb ing into his own being the mind of antiquity is Goethe. Whether he studies Raphael, Titian or the Greeks, Poussin can derive from them only salutary inspiration, for they are kindred spirits. Even in his person—a lover of solitude, incapable of flattery, scornful of all worldly vanities, noble and austere in countenance, unosten tatious, authoritative and dignified—he reminds us of one of the sages of ancient Greece. The finest aspect of Poussin's genius is to have put into his masterpieces more thought than it was ever given to any other painter to express, and to have found for that thought, poetic and philosophical by turns, an original and plastic interpretation. There is in Poussin's art a musical incantation, as it were. It is above all when he invents compositions where nature and humanity appear in closest unison that he moves us, and, despite his gravity, charms us. It is there that the memory of Titian and Giorgione inspires him to find new treasures. Poussin is one of the greatest landscape painters. His sketches are comparable only to those of Claude, and are in our opinion yet finer, while certain of them recall Turner's most dazzling water colours. It is upon a foundation of truth apprehended with emo tion that Poussin builds the creatures of his mind, landscapes such as the marvellous Homeric and Virgilian poem which forms the background of his Polypheme, the Elysian glades welcoming his Bacchanales and shading the repose of his sleeping nymphs. These landscapes are invented, but appear so real that only with sur prise do we fail to identify given spots in the Tiber or Anio val leys. Poussin is inferior to Titian in richness of colour as well as fulness and purity of form; but his poet-philosopher's genius has added a lofty spirituality and an indefinable touch of the heroic to what may be called the symphony of man and nature. So that this man, who from the age of 3o spent (except for the months' journey to Paris) his whole life in Rome, remains the most French of the great painters, and always kept in view that wise and noble balance between reason and feeling which was the ideal of the Ancients and has been that of artists and writers alike in the land of the Seine, Loire, Garonne and RhOne.
him to Rome and what held him there? Might he not have pro duced his masterpieces at Nancy, Paris or elsewhere? For this admirable landscapist has drawn from within himself the greatest number of his pictures, the very ones in which to our enchanted eyes all is beauty, poetry and truth. He made sometimes from nature drawings so beautiful that several have been attributed to Poussin, but in his paintings imagination predominates; it may even be said that it predominated more and more in proportion as Claude realized his genius. Without needing to reason, without any loss of his instinctive poetry, he understood by listening to Poussin and watching him paint that a sort of intellectual back ground would be an addition to his own visions and reveries.
Poussin had an incomparable prestige, but for the most part his influence was remote and except for his immediate disciples, Gaspard Dughet ("le Guaspre Poussin") and Jacques Stella, was felt only as an aspiration, more or less precise, towards an intel lectual and classical ideal. Some, because they died too young or for other reasons, escaped this influence entirely: for example Valentin de Boulogne, called "le Valentin" Portraiture.—The French School has always numbered good portrait-painters, this form of art being well suited to the French taste for psychological exactitude which manifests itself also through the moralists in literature. In the 16th century when the fate of painting in France seemed so gravely compromised, only this feeling for portraiture remained active. Later, at the end of the i 7th century, when an academic convention was threatening to stifle originality amongst painters, Largilliere and Rigaud painted portraits full of force and veracity. Even in the cere monial portrait, even in that where the subject is mythologically disguised, we feel that the painter will not renounce his rights as an interpreter of human physiognomy. Two men a generation apart, Philippe de Champaigne (1602-74) and Robert Nanteuil (c. 1623-78) a draughtsman and engraver more than a painter, were neither of them brilliant painters, virtuosi of the brush like Largilliere and Rigaud, but in their quality of portraitists they rise above them and above all by their love of truth.
Together with Nanteuil must be cited another engraver, a free lance draughtsman of genius, Jacques Callot (1592-1635). Did he ever execute a painting in oils? We can be certain of none, and this is surprising in view of the strictly pictorial qualities with which he was the first to endow etching, and the fact that it was painters most supremely and essentially worthy of the name, Wat teau and Goya, who seem, long afterwards to have been most mindful of his lyric masquerades and his Miseres de la Guerre.
Eustace le Sueur (1616-55) is an engaging personality possess ing real originality and deriving all his art from within. Without having been to Italy he reminds us of Raphael whom he prob ably knew only from engravings, but in his typically French way he followed the tradition of the 15th century illuminators. Pic tures such as the Messe de St. Martin and the Apparition de la Vierge a St. Martin where the painter seems a younger brother of Fra Angelico, are for religious emotion, unique in their time.