Die Flucht nach Ägypten

By 1657 Poussin was in his sixties and one of the most admired painters in Europe, the man who had made a whole French idea of order out of Italian landscape. A silk merchant from Lyon named Jacques Sérisier, settled in Paris, commissioned this small canvas from him, and Poussin composed the holy family's escape into Egypt with the calm geometry that was by then his signature. Then the painting more or less disappeared from view for centuries. It surfaced at an auction near Versailles in 1986 with a modest starting price, was bought cheaply, and only slowly came to be recognised as a genuine late Poussin. In 2007 the Louvre and the Lyon museum together paid around 17 million euros to secure it. It now hangs in Lyon, close to where the man who first ordered it made his fortune in silk.