Poussin’s Landscape

Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of ideas. No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was capable of being told by the pencil. He seized on, and struck off with grace and precision, just that point of view which would be likely to catch the reader's fancy. There is a significance, a consciousness in whatever he does (sometimes a vice, but oftener a virtue) beyond any other painter. His Giants sitting on the tops of craggy mountains, as huge themselves, and playing idly on their Pan's-pipes, seem to have been seated there these three thousand years, and to know the beginning and the end of their own story. An infant Bacchus or Jupiter is big with his future destiny. Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human intellect. His trees grow and expand their leaves in the air, glad of the rain, proud of the sun, awake to the winds of heaven. In his Plague of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His picture of the Deluge is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You see a waste of waters, wide, interminable: the sun is labouring, wan and weary, up the sky the clouds, dull and leaden, lie like a load upon the eye, and heaven and earth seem commingling into one confused mass!

----William Hazlitt

普桑的山水画作文地带提供中文翻译：

在所有画家之中，普桑是最富有诗意的。他是一个富于思想的画家。从来没有人在通过绘画表现故事的才能上及他一半，也从来没有人更了解如何通过画笔传达画意。他把握了可能引起读者幻思的那一视点，然后画笔一挥而就，既优美，又精致。无论他作什么画，都有一种内蕴及一种领悟，为其他画家所不及。这种领悟虽然有时候会是一个缺点，但更多的时候都是一种美德。他画中的巨人坐在悬崖之巅，巨大得犹如高山，懒散地吹奏着酒神特制的风笛，好像安坐在那里已有三千年，力求了解自己一生的开始和结尾。

作为婴儿的巴库斯或朱庇特正孕育着其未来的命运。甚至没有生命，不能说话的事物也在诉说着它们自己的语言。他笔下的蛇，作为命运的使者，也被赋予了人类智慧的灵感。他笔下的树木生长茂盛，在空中伸开浓枝密叶，喜沐雨水，为太阳而自豪，笑迎四面天风。

在他的《雅典的瘟疫》一画中，那些建筑似乎因恐惧而变得僵硬。他的《大洪水》那幅画也许是世界上最优秀的历史山水画。你看到的是一片汪洋大水，浩瀚无边：太阳正艰难地在天空攀升，显得苍白疲倦；云朵显得阴暗忧郁，沉重迟钝，好像一堆重荷压在眼睛上，天穹和大地混杂成为一团。