Anybody’s

Malcolm Bull

• Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665 by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat
  Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 560 pp, frs 350.00, September 1994, ISBN 2 7118 3027 6
• Nicolas Poussin by Anthony Blunt
  Pallas Athene, 690 pp, £24.95, January 1995, ISBN 1 873429 64 9
• Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665 by Richard Verdi, with an essay by Pierre Rosenberg
  Zwemmer, 336 pp, £39.50, January 1995, ISBN 0 302 00647 8
• Roma 1630: Il trionfo del pennello edited by Olivier Bonfait
  Electa, 260 pp, July 1994, ISBN 88 435 5047 0
• Poussin before Rome 1594-1624 by Jacques Thuillier
  Feigen, 119 pp, £40.00, January 1995, ISBN 1 873232 03 9
• The Expression of the Passions by Jennifer Montagu
  Yale, 256 pp, £35.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 300 05891 8
• L’Ecole du silence by Marc Fumaroli
  Flammarion, 512 pp, frs 295.00, May 1994, ISBN 2 08 012618 0
• To Destroy Painting by Louis Marin, translated by Mette Hjort
  Chicago, 196 pp, £31.95, April 1995, ISBN 0 226 50535 9

They want him back. They always have, but now they want him more than ever: living in Rome for almost his entire career was one thing, posthumous residence in England is another. That the artist ‘qui incame le XVIIe siècle français’ should have become (as Olivier Bonfait’s essay in the Paris catalogue describes him) ‘un objet totalement “anglo-saxon” ’ is seen as a source of national shame. Interviewed in Le Monde, Jacques Thuillier of the Collège de France complained that, ‘à l’étranger’, Poussin’s reputation had been dulled if not sullied; the quatercentenary of his birth was an opportunity to clean and polish his image to its true lustre, to show the world that the artist was (in the words of Thuillier’s colleague, Marc Fumaroli) ‘at heart ever more loyal to that noble simplicity of form that Frenchmen in the 17th century were quick to recognise as one of the ... distinctive characteristics of their own kingdom’.