ated, and his classical learning in after life was reckoned
great. He was regularly trained to be a painter under a master in his
native town, and afterwards in Paris.

Dissatisfied with the patronage which he received in Paris, Poussin went
to Rome when he was about thirty years of age. In Rome he is said to
have lived on familiar terms with a sculptor whose devotion to antique
art influenced his taste, and lent it the strong classical bent which it
retained. Poussin studied regularly in the school of Domenichino. After
some delay in attracting public notice, 'The Death of Germanicus,' and
'The Capture of Jerusalem,' which Poussin painted for Cardinal
Barberini, won general approval. In 1629, when Nicolas Poussin was in
his thirty-fifth year, he married the sister of his pupil, Gaspar
Dughet, who took Poussin's name, and is known as a painter, inferior to
his master, by the name of Gaspar Poussin.

Nicolas Poussin returned to Paris when he was a middle-aged man, was
presented to the king, Louis XIII., by Cardinal Richelieu, and offered
apartments in the Tuileries, with the title of painter in ordinary, and
a salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year. Poussin agreed to settle
in Paris, but on his going back to Rome to fetch his wife, and on the
King of France's dying, the attractions of the Eternal City proved too
great for the painter, and in place of removing his home to his native
country, he lived for the rest of his years in Rome, and died there in
1665, when he was seventy-one years of age. Except what can be judged of
him from his work, I do not know that much has been gathered of the
private character and life of Nicolas Poussin, notwithstanding that
there was a biography written of him fifty years ago by Lady Calcott,
and that his letters have been published in Paris. In the absence of
conclusive testimony one may conclude with some probability that he was
'quiet,' like his best paintings; a man who minded his own business, and
did not trouble the world by astonishing actions, good or bad.[32]

In painting his own picture, from which an engraving has been taken,
Poussin's classical preferences seem to have passed into the likeness,
for in the dress of the seventeenth century, the cloak (not unlike a
toga), the massive hand with the heavy signet-ring resting on what looks
like a closed portfolio, the painter has something of the severe air and
haughty expression of an old Roman; still more, perhaps, of the