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That hair, is it not bathed in light? Why, she breathes! That bosom, see! Ah! who would not worship it on bended knee? The flesh palpitates! Wait, she is about to rise; wait!" "Can you see anything?" whispered Poussin to Porbus. "Nothing. Can you?" "No."
But when writers justify the appropriation, of entire figures, without any such change, we do not agree with them; and cannot but think that the examples they have quoted, as in the Sacrifice at Lystra, by Raffaelle, and the Baptism, by Poussin, will fully support our position.
Almost everything in Mr. Whistler already existed in art. In the National Gallery the white stocking in the Philip reminds us of the white stockings in the portrait of Miss Alexander. In the British Museum we find the shadows that he transferred from Rembrandt to his own etchings. Degas took his drawing from Ingres and his colour that lovely brown! from Poussin.
Along the river bank, however, he had found the very scenery that Poussin so faithfully depicted: the sluggish, yellow stream fringed with reeds; low riven cliffs, whose chalky whiteness showed against the ruddy background of a far-stretching, undulating plain, bounded by blue hills; a few spare trees with a ruined porticus opening on to space atop of the bank, and a line of pale-hued sheep descending to drink, whilst the shepherd, with an elbow resting on the trunk of an ilex-tree, stood looking on.
One is not sure but every alteration of what is considered as defective in either, would destroy the effect of the whole. Poussin lived and conversed with the ancient statues so long, that he may be said to be better acquainted with then than with the people who were about him.
At twenty years of age, Nicholas Poussin steadily renounced every species of youthful pleasure and dissipation, that he might pursue his one noble object. He rose at daybreak, and regularly retired to rest at nine o'clock. During the winter months, he spent the early hours of the day in studying Greek and Latin under an old priest, who loved him and taught him gratuitously.
Despite of the excuses and remonstrances of Poussin, his friend insisted on his accompanying him to Poitou, assuring him of a hearty welcome from his own parents. From Raoul's father, indeed, the young painter received it; but his mother was a proud, ill-tempered woman, who affected to despise a dauber of canvas, and treated her son's friend as a sort of valet attached to his service.
He was regularly trained to be a painter under a master in his native town, and afterwards in Paris. Dissatisfied with the patronage which he received in Paris, Poussin went to Rome when he was about thirty years of age. In Rome he is said to have lived on familiar terms with a sculptor whose devotion to antique art influenced his taste, and lent it the strong classical bent which it retained.
Indeed, it was scarcely a sacrifice to do so, for my heart was too full to allow me to feel hunger. Poussin studied nature with a minuteness that often exposed him to raillery. Whenever he made a country excursion, he brought back a bag filled with pebbles and mosses, whose various tints and forms he afterwards studied with the most scrupulous care.
I seem to be paying a portion of the debt due by posterity to those who laboured long and painfully for it, when I stand rapt in admiration before the works of the great masters of the olden time, my heart touched with a lively sympathy for their destinies; nor can I look on the glorious faces or glowing landscapes that remain to us, evincing the triumph of genius over even time itself, by preserving on canvass the semblance of all that charmed in nature, without experiencing the sentiment so naturally and beautifully expressed in the celebrated picture, by Nicolas Poussin, of a touching scene in Arcadia, in which is a tomb near to which two shepherds are reading the inscription.
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