Poussin's Women

Poussin’s Women: Sex and Gender in the Artist’s Works examines the paintings and drawings of the well-known seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) from a gender studies perspective, focusing on a critical analysis of his representations of women. The book’s thematic chapters investigate Poussin’s women in their roles as predators, as lustful or the objects of lust, as lovers, killers, victims, heroines, or models of virtue. Poussin’s paintings reflect issues of gender within his social situation as he consciously or unconsciously articulated its conflicts and assumptions. A gender studies approach brings to light new critical insights that illuminate how the artist represented women, both positively and negatively, within the framework in his seventeenth-century culture. This book covers the artist’s works from Classical mythology, Roman history, Tasso, and the Bible. It serves as a good overview of Poussin as an artist, discussing the latest research and including new interpretations of his major works.

Thomas Troy :

Troy Thomas is Associate Professor of Humanities and Art History at The Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. His publications include a book, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity (2016), and two recent articles, "William Blake and Dead Man," Adaptation and "Poussin, Gombauld, and the Creation of Diana and Endymion," Art History.

"There is a great book to be written on Poussin’s women: the goddesses, saints and ordinary mortals who populate an œuvre marked by drastic metamorphoses of style and subject. Troy Thomas is to be applauded for recognising this fact, as well as for his contributions to scholarship on the artist over a long career [...]"
- Emily A. Beeny, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 163, No. 1422

''For students and lovers of Poussin’s work, Troy Thomas’s book on Poussin’s paintings of women has something to offer almost everyone. A rich and fully illustrated compendium [,] the pages of the volume provide enriching and informative examinations of famous and at times lesser-studied examples of the artist’s work . . . The analyses that Thomas offers are . . . detailed and illuminating.''
- Judith W. Mann, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 3, 2023

"Scholarship to date has paid little attention to the topic of women in Poussin’s art and Thomas’s study thus seeks to fill a major lacuna in research on the artist . . . [Thomas undertakes] a systematic assessment of how depictions of women in the artist’s overall oeuvre construct a discourse on female gender and sexuality . . . A scholar of seventeenth-century art and theory, particularly the careers of Poussin and Caravaggio, Thomas is well-equipped to plumb such questions and approaches his study with commanding knowledge of Poussin’s activities and oeuvre . . . Thomas wishes to demonstrate how closely Poussin’s fluctuating vision of women mirrors the reality women faced in French society in his time . . . as their rights underwent dramatic shifts over the course of the Seicento."
-- James R. Jewitt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Art Inquiries, Vol.18 Issue 4, 2023