Apollo in Love with Daphne

This was the last thing Poussin painted, and he never finished it. By the early 1660s his hands had begun to shake, a tremor that grew worse each year and shows plainly in the unsteady late drawings. Around 1664, knowing he could not complete the canvas, he gave it to his friend Cardinal Camillo Massimi in Rome rather than let it reach a buyer. The subject comes before the chase that everyone remembers. Here Apollo is still simply in love, the god among a crowd of river deities and cupids, with Daphne not yet fled and not yet changed into a laurel tree. Look along the edges and you can see where the brush stopped. Poussin died the following year, in 1665, at 71.