Nicolas Poussin Four Seasons Panels Removed From Display After Louvre Floods

Nicolas Poussin

Two Panels by the French classical Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin that make up part of his iconic Four Seasons Quartet at the Louvre were damaged by heavy thunderstorms on the 9th July. Several other Louvre masterpieces were also damaged including The Triumph of Mordecai by Jean-François de Troy the Paris museum has confirmed. Paintings by the 17th-century French artists Georges de La Tour and Eustache Le Sueur, which was also on display in a room close to the water damage have been removed for fear of damages.

Thunderstorms swept across Paris late on Sunday, July 9 causing 50mm of rain to fall in an hour

Restorers in the museum’s conservation department are assessing the masterpieces to establish the scale of the damage. Several rooms in the museum were closed to the public including the mezzanine of the Denon wing, the first floor of the Sully wing and the second floor of the Court Square Thunderstorms swept across Paris late on Sunday, July 9 causing 50mm of rain to fall in an hour. Metro stations were flooded, and general disruption occurred.

Jean-François de Troy - The Triumph of Mordecai Detail
Jean-François de Troy – The Triumph of Mordecai Detail

The Four Seasons (fr Les Quatre Saisons) was the last set of four oil paintings completed by the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). The set was painted in Rome between 1660 and 1664 for the Duc de Richelieu, the nephew of Cardinal Richelieu. Each painting is an elegiac landscape with Old Testament figures conveying the different seasons and times of the day. Executed when the artist was in failing health suffering from a tremor in his hands, the Seasons are a philosophical reflection on order in the natural world. The iconography evokes not only the Christian themes of death and resurrection but also the pagan imagery of classical antiquity: the poetic words of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Virgil’s Georgics. The paintings have currently been removed at the Louvre in Paris.

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