“Of these two artists, the older evidently exercised over the other the superiority which genius has over talent. The smallest hints of Le Poussin were received by Claude Lorrain with deference and respect; and yet, to judge from the prices at which they severally sold their pictures, the landscape painter had for the time an indisputable superiority.”
Claude Gelee, called Lorrain, had fled when quite young from the shop of the confectioner with whom his parents had placed him. He had found means of getting to Rome; there he worked, there he lived, and there he died, returning but once to France, in the height of his renown, for just a few months, without even enriching his own land with any great number of his works; nearly all, of them remained on foreign soil. Le Poussin, born at the Andelys in 1593, made his way with great difficulty to Italy. He was by that time thirty years old, and had no more desire than Claude to return to France, where painting was with difficulty beginning to obtain a standing. His reputation, however, had penetrated thither. King Louis XIII. was growing weary of Simon Vouet’s factitious lustre; he wanted Le Poussin to go to Paris. The painter for a long while held out; the king insisted. “I shall go,” said Le Poussin, “like one sentenced to be sawn in halves and severed in twain.” He passed eighteen months in France, welcomed enthusiastically, lodged at the Tuileries, magnificently paid, but exposed to the jealousies of Simon Vouet and his pupils. Worried, thwarted, frozen to death by the hoarfrosts of Paris, he took the road back to Rome in November, 1642, on the pretext of going to fetch his wife, and did not return any more. He had left in France some of his masterpieces, models of that, new, independent, and conscientious art, faithfully studied from nature in all its Italian grandeur, and from the treasures of the antique. “How did you arrive at such perfection?” people would ask Le Poussin. “By neglecting nothing,” the painter would reply. In the same way Newton was soon to discover the great laws of the physical world, “by always thinking thereon.”
During Le Poussin’s stay at Paris he had taken as a pupil Eustache Lesueur, who had been trained in the studio of Simon Vouet, but had been struck from the first with the incomparable genius and proud independence of the master sent to him by fate. Alone he had supported Le Poussin in his struggle against the envious; alone he entered upon the road which revealed itself to him whilst he studied under Le Poussin. He was poor; he had great difficulty in managing to live. The delicacy, the purity, the suavity of his genius could shine forth in their entirety nowhere but in the convent of the Carthusians, whose cloister he was commissioned to decorate. There he painted the life of St. Bruno, breathing into this almost mystical work all the religious poetry of his soul and of his talent, ever delicate and chaste even in the allegorical figures of mythology with which he before long adorned the Hotel Lambert. He had returned to his favorite pursuits, embellishing the churches of Paris with incomparable works, when, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife, and exhausted by the painful efforts of his genius, he died at thirty-seven, in that convent of the Carthusians which he glorified with his talent, at the same time that he edified the monks with his religious zeal. Lesueur succumbed in a struggle too rude and too rough for his pure and delicate nature. Lebrun had returned from that Italy which Lesueur had never been able to reach; the old rivalry, fostered in the studio of Simon Vouet, was already being renewed between the two artists; the angelic art gave place to the worldly and the earthly. Lesueur died; Lebrun found himself master of the position, assured by anticipation, and as it were by instinct, of sovereign, dominion under the sway of the young king for whom he had been created.
Old Philip of Champagne alone might have disputed with him the foremost rank. He had passionately admired Le Poussin, he had attached himself to Lesueur. “Never,” says M. Vitet, “had he sacrificed to fashion; never had he fallen into the vagaries of the degenerate Italian style.” This upright, simple, painstaking soul, this inflexible conscience, looking continually into the human face, had preserved in his admirable portraits the life and the expression of nature which he was incessantly trying to seize and reproduce. Lebrun was preferred to him as first painter to the king by Louis XIV. himself; Philip of Champagne was delighted thereat; he lived, in retirement, in fidelity to his friends of Port-Royal, whose austere and vigorous lineaments he loved to trace, beginning with M. de St. Cyran, and ending with his own daughter, Sister Suzanne, who was restored to health by the prayers of Mother Agnes Arnauld.