Old postcards Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was a French painter and one of the founders of classicism. He settled in Rome in 1624 and painted mostly subjects from classical mythology, the Bible and poetry, giving landscape more and more room in later years. He valued line above colour, and his compositions are tightly ordered.

The Soviet postcards of Poussin in this subsection were printed in 1957; only Satyr and Nymph carries 1956. Two subjects draw on Torquato Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered: Tancred and Erminia, in which Erminia cuts her hair to bind the wounded knight, and Rinaldo and Armida.

Two more subjects come from Ovid. The Empire of Flora (c. 1631) gathers around the goddess of flowers the mythical figures who turned into plants — Narcissus, Hyacinth, Adonis. Landscape with Polyphemus shows the Cyclops singing to the nymph Galatea, an episode from the Metamorphoses.

For Tancred and Erminia and The Finding of Moses there are also separate detail cards that enlarge one part of the composition.