724, the well-known Rape of the Sabine Women; 740, a most perfect
work of his maturity, Orpheus and Eurydice (1659); and 742, Apollo and
Daphne, his last work, left unfinished. Such are some of the more
striking manifestations of this remarkable genius who alone, says
Hazlitt, has the right to be considered as the painter of classical
antiquity. His integrity was so rigid that he once returned part of
the price paid for one of his works which he deemed excessive. To
the modern, Poussin is somewhat antipathetic by reason of his
scholarly aloofness and insensibility to the passions and actualities
of life. As Reynolds remarked: he lived and conversed with ancient
statues so long, that he was better acquainted with them than with the
people around him, and had studied the ancients so much, that he had
acquired a habit of thinking in their way. He saw Nature through the
glass of Time, says Hazlitt, and his friend Dom Bonaventura tells how
he often met the solitary artist sketching in the Forum or returning
from the Campagna with specimens of moss, pebbles, flowers, etc., to
be used as models. When asked the secret of his artistic perfection,
he would modestly answer: "_Je n'ai rien neglige._"

[Footnote 215: The Goldsmiths' Guild of Paris was accustomed, from
1630-1701, to present to Notre Dame an _ex-voto_ picture every
May-day, painted by the most renowned artist of the time.]

[Footnote 216: The reader may be referred to Hazlitt's essay, _On a
Landscape of Nicholas Poussin_, as an antidote to Ruskin's wayward
criticism.]

[Illustration: SHEPHERDS OF ARCADY.

_Poussin._]

Claude Gelee (1600-1682) known as Claude, and one of the greatest
names in the history of modern painting, also spent most of his
artistic career at Rome. He was the first to bring the glory of the
sun and the sun-steeped atmosphere on to canvas. He touches a new
chord in the symphony of colour and by his poetic charm and romantic
feeling stirs a deeper emotion. He, too, was a strenuous, implacable
worker, a loving student of Nature, passing days in silent abstraction
before her varying moods.

The Louvre possesses sixteen Claudes, among which we may emphasise on
the L. wall, 310, View of a Port; 311, a poetic and glowing
representation of the Roman Forum, before the old Campo Vaccino, with
its romantic and picturesque aspect, had been excavated by modern
archaeologists. 314 and 316, Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsis, and Ulysses
restoring Chryseis