"Nicolas Poussin, Homage" is an original color lithograph by Claude Weisbuch. The artist signed the piece in the lower right and wrote the edition number, 37/180, in the lower left. This piece depicts three figures in the center of the space. Weisbuch's inspiration for this piece and his reference for the figures is Nicholas Poussin's "Et in Arcadia Ego".

21 1/2" x 29 7/8" art
27 1/2" x 29 7/8" frame

Historical Info:

Nicolas Poussin, a seventeenth-century Classical Baroque French painter, was known and revered for his work that echoed the classical style of Greece and Rome. Et in Arcadia Ego, from 1637-38, is perhaps Poussin’s most well-known painting. The painting’s title, which is the same as the inscription on the tomb that the shepherds and shepherdess are examining, translates as “Even in Arcadia, I am here.” Poussin’s biographer, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, understood the “I” of the phrase to refer to Death, thus making the painting a memento mori, reminding the viewer that even in the utopia of Arcadia, death still exists. 

Claude Weisbuch’s lithograph, entitled Nicholas Poussin, Homage from 1976, references Poussin’s painting in a more general sense in its depiction of two classically robed figures seated among ruins. One of the figures appears to be a classical sculpture, as it has a wing. The figures do not appear to be reading an inscription on a tomb, rather the left-hand figure appears to be gesturing toward a ruin in the background of the work. While Weisbuch depicts the scene with a swirling line which is characteristically his, he references Poussin’s classical line in his depictions of the figures, foliage, and ruins. Like Poussin, Weisbuch centralizes the figures, surrounding them with trees and ruins in a classically harmonious composition. In his Homage, the artist creates a classical harmony that echoes Poussin but that is nevertheless his own work.