The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt from 1627 at the Metropolitan Museum shows the Holy Family pausing on their journey to Egypt to escape Herod's massacre of the innocents, in a pastoral setting that combines sacred narrative with the classical landscape tradition. Poussin's treatment of this beloved subject placed the Holy Family within an idealized classical landscape that served as a philosophical theater — the ordered natural world providing the appropriate setting for divine presence in the world. Working in Rome from 1624 onwards, he served a cultivated international clientele who prized both the learned classical elements of his landscapes and the devotional warmth of his sacred figures. His warm early palette and fluid handling of the figures give this work the sensuous charm of his first Roman decade, before his compositions became more austere and geometrically severe. The Metropolitan Museum holds this as one of its important early Poussin works, alongside other examples from his developing Roman period.

The figures rest within a serene landscape organized with classical principles. Poussin's warm palette and balanced composition create an atmosphere of sacred pastoral peace.