Landscape with a Calm

In the serene last years of his life Nicolas Poussin turned from the grand historical machines of his middle period toward landscape, composing views of the Roman Campagna in which every element — the trees, the water, the antique buildings, the few staffage figures — is ordered with the same classical logic he had brought to figure painting. Landscape with a Calm (the French title Un Temps calme et serein gives its mood) shows a still lake beneath a sky of soft cloud, a town and a round tower on the far shore, and a few travellers resting in the foreground; the calm is absolute, the light even and golden, an image of the stoic’s peace that the painter set against the companion storm pieces he made in these years. Painted in 1650–51 for his Paris patron Pointel, it belongs to the series of landscapes that mark the culmination of the classic tradition. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.