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The Crossing of the Red Sea

Creator

French Artist · 1594–1665

Painter

> Something celestial shone in his eyes; his pointed nose and wide brow ennobled his modest face. So wrote a biographer about Nicolas Poussin, a philosopher who expressed himself in paint. Pointing to his forehead, Gian Lorenzo Bernini called Poussin "a painter who works up here." Born to Norman peasants, Poussin went to Paris in 1612, working with Mannerist artists and collaborating with Philippe

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Date: about 1626–1628
Medium: Red chalk
Culture: French
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum
Object ID: ca5bfb89-d35a-4b40-996e-582fc8d0c2b0

From the Getty Museum record

*My temperament compels me to look for and take pleasure in well-ordered things. I avoid confusion, which is contrary and opposed to my nature, just as light is opposed to the darkness.* Thus Nicolas Poussin explained his tendency to balance and choreograph even the violence and haste inherent in his narrative subjects. In drawings such as this one, he worked out the structure of a composition using clear strokes that captured the figures' essential gestures or shapes. He then toned down the movement, gesture, and tumult in the final painting. This is a typical development for most painters, but one even more conspicuous in Poussin's work. He made this study and at least five others in preparation for a painting commissioned by a member of an illustrious Italian family prominent in government and civic affairs and active patrons of the arts.

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