Nicolas Poussin

French, (1594–1665)
Poussin was born into a family of some local distinction in Normandy, where he probably received early training in painting. He spent most of his formative years in Paris, and he then went to Italy by at least 1624. He was a popular and influential painter who successfully subordinated dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs, which were based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. His work epitomized the contemporary search for equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most artistic critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s.