Nicolas Poussin was a 17th-century French painter, a major representative of pictorial classicism. History painter, religious compositions, mythological, with figures, animated landscapes. He sought the good taste of antiquity, sometimes associating or bringing back to it the forms of nature and those of art. Nicolas Poussin mainly focused on expressive beauties, as if painting with a vivid and precise line the language of thought and feeling: he thus sought in antiquity that ideal or intellectual beauty, at the same time moral, which made him choose the historical subjects most appropriate for noble and expressive developments of composition and style. The richness of his compositions and the beauty of his expressions earned him the nickname The painter of witty people. One of the greatest classical masters of French painting, a European genius, as recalled by the Nicolas Poussin exhibition in Paris in 1994, on the occasion of the celebration of the fourth centenary of his birth.