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Study for the Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite or the Birth of Venus

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 1634
Medium: Pen and brown ink
Culture: French
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum

Nicolas Poussin made this drawing as a study for the central group in a painting of the marriage of Neptune and Amphitrite, the god and goddess of the sea. It may show his initial steps in developing the final composition of the painting, commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu, an important art patron and chief minister for Louis XIII. Using simple oval forms for bodies and heads and lightly sketched limbs, Poussin worked out the spatial relationships among the figures. He changed the arrangement in the final painting but kept the two seated nymphs and the triton with a fluttering piece of drapery.

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