The following was written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California:

Nicolas Poussin was born in 1594 to middle-class parents in a small village near the town of Les Andelys in Normandy, France. Apart from a few lessons from the now almost forgotten Mannerist, Quentin Varin, Poussin was his own painting master.

His formal education was literary; he learned Latin first at the parish school, then at college, and with that foundation was able to acquire a considerable knowledge of the Latin Poets. His self-education in art and literature was a lifelong project for him. In Paris, he became the pupil of Noel Jouvenet, then Ferdinand Elle, and Lallemant.

The portable classroom of a painter concerned with classical values would at some point have to move to Italy. First Poussin made a brief journey to Tuscany in 1617 and in 1642 he settled in Rome where he lived for the rest of his life. With his marriage in 1630 to Ann-Marie Dughet, the daughter of a French cook living in Rome, Poussin recreated a French family for himself. In 1640 he was sent for by Louis XIII of France at Cardinal Richelieu's instigation and was appointed court painter. He died in Rome in November 1665 at the age of seventy-one.

Poussin was to painting what Descartes was to philosophy: a believer in reason above all. An architect with canvas, he organized his scenes like luminous lessons in logic, seeing structure where skin was and portraying bodies as marble. Even Picasso, using Poussin as a pianist might an exercise in arpeggios, steadied his nerves by copying one of the past master's works while gunfire echoed through the streets of Paris in 1944.

Sources include:
Alfred Corn in Art News, November 1991
Time Magazine, July 22, 1966
Poussin Peintre by Andree Hayum in Art in America, May 1995