Landscape with a Calm (Un Tem[p]s calme et serein)

Landscape with a Calm from 1651 at the Getty Museum is one of Poussin's most celebrated late landscapes, embodying his mature vision of nature as a harmonious philosophical presence ordered by the same rational principles that govern human virtue. Painted as the companion to a Landscape with a Storm, the Calm represents the Stoic ideal of inner serenity, the mental peace that virtue and rational self-governance can achieve independent of external circumstances. Poussin's landscapes treat nature as an ordered theater of philosophical meaning, structuring trees, rocks, and figures into geometric compositions of perfect classical balance. The measured serenity of this work was achieved through decades of study and philosophical reflection, the result of a vision of nature that was simultaneously empirical observation of the Roman Campagna and philosophical meditation on order and harmony. The J. Paul Getty Museum holds this as one of its most important European works, a late masterpiece of Poussin's classical landscape tradition.

The expansive landscape is organized with perfect classical balance. Poussin's late palette of measured, luminous tones creates a vision of nature as philosophical order.