Gallery 620 - Poussin, La Tour, and Seventeenth-Century French Painting

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Louis XIV famously declared, "I am the State" ("L'état, c'est moi"), but in the seventeenth century much of the finest French art happened far away from Paris and Versailles. On view in the Harry Payne Bingham Galleries, Poussin's deeply serious canvases—the drama and tragedies of life viewed through the lens of Roman literature—were painted in Rome, as were Claude Lorrain's poetic, light-filled landscapes and Valentin's gritty soldiers of fortune. Georges de La Tour created his haunting pictures of gypsies and ascetic saints in Lorraine, in northeastern France. The work of these artists laid out new territory for the imagination.

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