Poussin & L'amour

Exhibition at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, 26 November 2022 - 5 March 2023

The genius of Nicolas Poussin has not yet revealed all its secrets. Considered from the 17th century onwards as the founder of the French school of painting, Poussin is today famous for his austere paintings, in which the rigour of the lines competes with the depth of the subjects. However, from the beginning of his career, Poussin was a painter-poet, a storyteller of the omnipotence of love, of the happiness it inspires and the suffering it inflicts, who made a name for himself with the hedonism of his early Roman paintings.

Through some fifty works, this exhibition catalogue reveals a seductive and seductive Poussin, far from the austere image of the painter-philosopher under which he is known today. The book analyses the way in which the artist treated love, a constant subject of inspiration, from The Death of Chioné, his first known painting, painted around 1622, to his last painting, Apollo in Love with Daphne.