The Four Seasons (Poussin)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Four Seasons (fr Les Quatre Saisons) was the last set of four oil paintings completed by the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). The set was painted in Rome between 1660 and 1664 for the Duc de Richelieu, the nephew of Cardinal Richelieu. Each painting is an elegiac landscape with Old Testament figures conveying the different seasons and times of the day. Executed when the artist was in failing health suffering from a tremor in his hands, the Seasons are a philosophical reflection on the order in the natural world. The iconography evokes not only the Christian themes of death and resurrection but also the pagan imagery of classical antiquity: the poetic worlds of Milton's Paradise Lost and Virgil's Georgics. The paintings currently hang in a room on their own in the Louvre in Paris.
