French-Romans, if I may call them so, of whom revolutionary times
nearly two centuries later, afforded so many examples. This is a
handsome, dignified face, with austerity in its pride. The slightly
curled hair is thrown back with a certain consciousness from the knit
brow, and from the shoulders. There is only the faintest shadow of a
moustache over the cleanly cut, firmly closed mouth.

Poussin painted largely, and his pictures have been often engraved. With
harmonious composition, good drawing and colouring, his pictures alike
profited and suffered from the classical atmosphere in which they had
their being. They gained in that correctness which in its highest form
becomes noble truthfulness, but they lost in freedom. The figures in the
pictures had frequently the statuesqueness which in sculpture suits the
material, but in painting is stiffness.

Nicolas Poussin had an exceptional reputation for a historical painter
in his day. As a landscape painter, Mr Ruskin, while waging war with
Nicolas Poussin's brother-in-law and assumed namesake, Gaspar, notably
excepts Nicolas from his severest strictures, and treats his efforts in
landscape painting with marked respect. At the same time, however, the
critic censures the painter for a want of thorough acquaintance with
nature, and the laws of nature, ignorance not uncommon in any day, and
nearly universal in Nicolas Poussin's day. 'The great master of elevated
ideal landscape,' Mr Ruskin calls Nicolas Poussin, and illustrates his
excellence in one respect, after contrasting it with the slovenliness of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, by describing the vine in Poussin's 'Nursing of
Jupiter,' in the Dulwich Gallery, thus:--

'Every vine-leaf, drawn with consummate skill and untiring diligence,
produces not only a true group of the most perfect grace and beauty, but
one which in its pure and simple truth belongs to every age of nature,
and adapts itself to the history of all time.' 'One of the finest
landscapes that ancient art has produced, the work of a really great
mind,' Mr Ruskin distinguishes the 'Phocian' of Nicolas Poussin in the
National Gallery, before proceeding to point out its faults.

Again, Mr Ruskin, writing of the street in the centre of another
landscape by Nicolas Poussin, indicates it with emphasis:--'the street
in the centre of the really great landscape of Poussin (great in
feeling, at least) marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery,' The criticism
with which Mr Ruskin f