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Ever since 1648, when the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was founded, Poussin has been presented as the exemplar of French classicism. But Poussin--who was middle-aged when the Academy began and spent most of his life in Rome, far away from the struggle to define a truly French art--always remained something of an outsider in relation to the establishment that crowned him the ultimate insider. Poussin arrived in Rome in 1624, when he was thirty. In 1640, Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu wanted him to come to Paris and take up the position of premier peintre du roi, but during his two years there he chafed at the sorts of public commissions that he was expected to carry out, and he was back in Rome in 1642, where he lived until his death in 1665. Most of his paintings were done for wealthy connoisseurs; he was very much a man who painted to please himself. While the conferences held at the French Academy in the seventeenth century involved tremendously erudite, almost legalistically precise discussions of the meanings of gestures and objects in Poussin's paintings, it is by no means clear that this is how he thought about his paintings, or wanted others to think about them. There is an experimental, even a playful quality about the erudition of this great Frenchman who spent most of his creative life in Rome, and it seems to have gotten lost in the bureaucratic intricacies of the Parisian art world, where he was celebrated as the French Raphael and his subtlest inventions were sometimes treated as if they were little more than lesson plans.
Rosenberg and Christiansen echo the ideas of Blunt when they argue that Poussin's processes were more intuitive than the arbiters of French academic taste in the last decades of the seventeenth century cared to believe. Evidence to support this line of thinking can be discovered in Poussin's letters and in the testimony of his friends, as well as through close studies of the way that his compositions and themes appear to have evolved. One of the works that is significant in this regard is Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe,
