Autumn

Poussin was in his late sixties and long settled in Rome when the duc de Richelieu, a grand-nephew of the cardinal, commissioned four canvases of the seasons. They occupied him from about 1660 to 1664 and were the last pictures he finished. By then his hands shook badly enough that he apologised for it in letters, and the Louvre's curators read that tremor in the loose, unsteady touch of the set. For autumn he took a scene from the Book of Numbers. The scouts Moses sent into Canaan come back carrying one bunch of grapes so heavy it hangs from a pole between two men. The grapes are the season's harvest and the scouts' evidence that the land was worth entering. Poussin died in Rome in November 1665, and the following month the four seasons were bought for Louis XIV along with nine other pictures by him.