Date: 07-08-2005
Owning Institution: The Louvre
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 17th Century      

Today is the first Sunday of August; and this week’s painting is the first of four sunstruck pictures chosen to mark the month. Entitled Summer, or Ruth and Boaz, the work was painted by the French artist Nicholas Poussin between 1660 and 1664, close to the end of his life. One of four paintings on the theme of the four different seasons, all created for the Duc de Richelieu, nephew of the famous French statesman, it is now in the Louvre, in Paris.

Not much is known about the history of the commission, which receives no mention either in the artist’s letters or in the biographies of him written by his contemporaries. The French art historian and critic Andre Felibien was the  first writer to describe Poussin’s four seasons, although he did so briefly and damned them with faint praise: “It is true that if one still sees in these four paintings the force and beauty of the painter’s genius, one also observes in them the feebleness of his hand.” Many subsequent writers have concurred, but when the pictures were cleaned and restored some ten years ago, for the occasion of the great Poussin exhibition at the Royal Academy, they were a revelation. They may have been painted in a slightly freer, looser style than the artist’s celebrated landscapes and mythologies of the 1640s and 1650s, but that is part of their power and originality. In the case of Summer, restoration revealed the long-osbcured splendour, in particular, of the shimmering field of wheat that stretches back into the distance – an effect achieved, by the painter, with wonderful subtlety and lightness of touch, through a multitude of stippled dabs and dashes of yellow paint that seem to sparkle like gold.

Poussin, who was an artist of great rigour and formality, famously remarked that “my nature compels me to seek and love things that are well ordered, fleeing confusion, which is as contrary and inimical to me as is day to deepest night.” Summer is a kind of painted hymn to the ideal of order to which the artist aspired. Illuminated by the bright, even light of early morning, Poussin’s landscape recedes, step by step, with a clarity akin to that of a mathematical proposition. Behind the three foreground figures, whose gestures form a nearly rectangular pattern, two walls of cut corn have been exactly squared to the plane of the canvas itself. The same is true of the building on the faraway hilltop, and also of the horses that move across the scene in the righthand middle distance, like a kind of living frieze – they were in fact based on the frieze of horses on the Arch of Titus in Rome, where Poussin spent almost his entire creative life, and contain within them a distant Roman memory of the great frieze of horses created by Phidias, on the temple of the Parthenon in Athens. Even the clouds in the sky seem locked into the rhythms and the harmonious geometry of the whole composition. Poussin presents to the eye an extensive but rectilinear, box-like space which seems so carefully structured that it could easily be drawn out in ground plan, like the interior of a perfectly proportioned building. Yet for all its restraint and artifice, the picture conveys the vivid actuality of a real landscape, seen and remembered. Parts of the landscape around Rome, particularly the Alban Hills and the Sabine Hills, where Poussin walked and drew throughout his life, still look very much like this today.

Poussin’s treatment of the theme of the seasons was extremely original. There were two traditional ways of approaching the subject at the time when he created his four pictures. One was to personify each season using mythological figures bearing appropriate attributes, the pagan deity Ceres being a popular choice for summer. The other, more popular convention, which had its roots in Northern European art, was to depict each season by painting a landscape peopled with figures engaged in the labours of that particular time of year. But Poussin departed from the traditions that he had inherited by making each of his seasonal landscapes the setting for an episode drawn from biblical history. This was something that had not been done before.

In the case of Summer, the chosen story is that of Ruth and Boaz, drawn from the Old Testament. The artist shows the Moabite Ruth kneeling before the Israelite Boaz and asking if she may glean the wheat from his fields. The two are shown in contrasting gestures of humility and magnanimity. Poussin has chosen to paint the moment when Boaz grants Ruth her wish, telling his servants to “reproach her not” (Ruth II, 1-7). Later on in the story, Ruth and Boaz marry, establishing through their children the line of David and thereby of Christ. According to medieval tradition, the marriage of Ruth and Boaz symbolised the the union of Christ with the Church. Poussin emphasises the higher significance of his summer landscape painting, not only through the almost ritualistic seriousness of the two principal figures’ demeanour, but also by including a pair of women baking bread, to the left of the scene – a detail doubtless intended to put the contemplatively inclined viewer in mind of the Eucharist and Christ’s salvific role in the destiny of mankind. Beside them, reinforcing this pattern of associations, is the artist has included a superfluous swatch of red drapery, as a vivid as a splash of blood.

Poussin’s Summer is no mere depiction of a particular time of year. It is a meditation on the overarching cosmic patterns of time, when seen from a particular Christian perspective. The perfectly ordered landscape stands, ultimately, for the perfection of the divine plan.