Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun
In keeping with the Greek writer Lucian (125-180 A.D.), the giant blind Orion was shown directed to the sun healing rays by Cedalion, who was riding his back.
Poussin has given the story of a meteorological subtext by showing the steam of the earth rising toward the moon (where Diana stands watching); they will turn into rain.
Poussin describes this poetic image - one of his greatest landscapes - for Michel Passart, Paris's important patron of Poussin and Claude Lorrain.
Catalogue Entry
In the most familiar variant of the Orion myth the gigantic hunter was blinded by Oenopion, king of the island of Chios,
after Orion attacked Oenopion's daughter Merope in a moment of drunkenness.
Driven from the island, Orion found his way to Lemnos where Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith of the gods, had his servant Cedalion guide him to the East where the sun would heal him.
In a later development, Orion is killed by the huntress Diana for reasons that vary widely.
This simple narrative, however, cannot account for many details in Poussin's composition, in particular the presence of Diana who watches Orion's progress benevolently from the storm clouds which veil his sight.
In an article of 1944 that has influenced all subsequent scholarship, Ernst Gombrich argued for interpreting the subject of the picture in allegorical terms.
He identified the direct literary source as a hypothetical description of a fresco in a nobleman's home found in the writings of Lucian (Greek, A.D. 125–180, De domo: 27–29):
"Orion, who is blind is carrying Cedalion, and the latter, riding on his back, is showing him the way to the sunlight. The rising sun is healing the blindness of Orion, and Hephaestos views the incident from Lemnos."
It was, however, in Natale Conti's Latin edition of Mythologiae—the standard source for classical mythology in Poussin's day—that Gombrich found a closer link with the painting's composition and the key to its extraordinary suggestiveness.
Conti follows an alternative, pseudo-meteorological interpretation of the myth, in which Orion was fathered by Neptune, Jupiter, and Apollo (or the elements of Water, Air, and Fire).
"The better to understand the formation of the elements, of the winds, and of that which is produced in the celestial regions," he writes, "we are introduced to Orion, . . . who is nothing but the stuff of the winds, the rain, and the thunder and lightning . . .
" Everything is assembled from these elements; sea water is transformed by the sun (Apollo), which elevates the vapors into the air;
Diana (who killed Orion because he dared to touch her) gathers up these vapors and "converts them into rains and storms thus overthrowing them with her arrows and sending them downwards."
Conti's Orion story is, to quote Gombrich, an allegory of "the drama of the circulation of water in nature." It is the reason for the prominence of the vapors rising from the lower right.
Other sources for the composition have also been suggested.
In a recent swing of the pendulum from the long-held view of Poussin as a cerebral painter with a deep knowledge of early Latin texts,
Van Helsdingen (2002) is inclined to limit Poussin's sources for the Orion composition to the French editions of Natale Conti's Mythologiae and Philostratus's Imagines (for the figure of Cedalion carried on Orion's shoulders).
Both were available in Rome at the time. Badt (1969) challenged Gombrich's interpretation in a more fundamental way,
believing that Poussin conceived the subject in a spirit counter to that of Conti and, here as elsewhere in his paintings,
intended the depiction of myth as a concrete reality rather than the visualization of allegory.
In his view, Poussin intended the cloud with Diana standing on it to be understood as the unhappy fate hanging over the giant—that is, his future death at Diana's hands.
The emphasis for Badt is on Poussin’s reanimation of the power of classical divinity, not the disenchanted interpretation of ancient myth put forward by Conti.
According to Poussin's early biographer and close friend André Félibien (1685),
this picture, for which he implies a date of 1658, was the single work that Poussin made for Michel Passart,
the wealthy Parisian finance minister who owned at least seven paintings by the artist.
This suggests that the collector may have played some role in the unusual choice of subject.
We know that Passart owned a second late landscape by Poussin, the Landscape with a Woman Washing her Feet (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa),
and his remarkable interest in landscape painting is evident in an inventory made at the time of his wife's death in 1684.
The painting has inspired the passionate admiration of poets as well as—as indicated above—intense scholarly debate.
In an 1822 article dedicated to the picture, the English essayist and critic William Hazlitt wrote that "
[the picture] breathes the spirit of the morning; its moisture, its repose, its obscurity,
waiting the miracle of light to kindle it into smiles; the whole is, like the principal figure in it, 'a forerunner of the dawn.'
" And, he continues, "one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter's canvas,
and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things." The young John Keats, strongly influenced by Hazlitt,
must refer to the picture in Book 2 of his 1818 poem Endymion: "Or blind Orion hungry for the moon."
As is typical of Poussin's late landscapes, the technique is almost pointillist, due to his failing eyesight, and perhaps due also to a shaking hand.
The muted effect is particularly appropriate to the meditative, searching quality of these late masterpieces.
A copy of the painting was sold at Christie's, Rome, November 29–30, 1993, no. 228.
Mary Sprinson de Jesús 2010; updated by Keith Christiansen and Adam Eaker 2016
Provenance
Michel Passart, Paris (1658–at least 1684 [d. 1692]; inv., February 14–26, 1684 [following the death of Mme Passart in November 1683, who left a half share of the paintings that belonged to the couple to their son, Antoine-Michel], probably one of the two landscapes by Poussin, nos. 43 and 46, valued at 1500 livres each); possibly his son, Antoine-Michel Passart, Paris (d. 1684); Pierre de Beauchamp, Paris (by 1687); private collection, Paris (until 1739; sold for 600 livres to Godefroy and Godefroid); [Charles Godefroy and Ferdinand-Joseph Godefroid, Paris, 1739–43; sold for 950 livres to Hay]; [Andrew Hay, London, 1743–45; his sale, Cock, London, February 14–15, 1745, no. 46, for £31.10.0 to Rutland]; John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle, Grantham, Leicestershire (1745–58; his sale, London, [dates unknown] 1758, no. 60, for £53.11 to Reynolds); Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (from 1758; sold for 500 gns. to Calonne); Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Paris (until 1795; sale, Skinner and Dyke, London, March 23–28, 1795, no. 98, as purchased from Sir Joshua Reynolds, for £131.5 to Bryan [i.e., bought in by Calonne's mortgagees]); Bryan's Gallery (sale by private treaty, April 27, 1795, no. 135); Noël Desenfans (sale of pictures bought by him for the King of Poland, Skinner and Dyke, London, March 16–18, 1802, no. 172, for £157.10 to Potts [bought in?]); [Philippe Panné, London, until d.; sale of his remaining stock, Christie's, London, March 26, 1819, no. 63, for £116.11 to Bonnemaison]; chevalier Férréol de Bonnemaison, Paris (1819–20; sold for 600 livres); Reverend John Sanford, vicar of Nynehead Court, Somerset (1820–at least 1847; cats., 1838, no. 184, and 1847, p. 9); his son-in-law, Frederick Henry Paul Methuen, 2nd Baron Methuen [who married Anna Horatia Caroline Sanford], Corsham Court, Chippenham Wiltshire (by 1857–d.1891); their son, Paul Sanford Methuen, 3rd Baron Methuen, Corsham Court, Chippenham Wiltshire (1891–ca. 1924; cat. 1903, p. 60; sold to Durlacher with Tancred Borenius as intermediary); [Durlacher, London and New York, 1924; sold to MMA]
Artist:
Nicolas Poussin (French, Les Andelys 1594–1665 Rome)
Date:
1658
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
46 7/8 x 72 in. (119.1 x 182.9 cm)
Classification:
Paintings
Credit Line:
Fletcher Fund, 1924
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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