Eucharist

Poussin painted this in Rome around 1638, for a friend rather than a church. Cassiano dal Pozzo was a scholar and collector who had spent years gathering thousands of drawings that recorded the ancient world, an archive people called his Paper Museum, and he asked Poussin for a set showing the seven sacraments of the Church. What stands out in this Eucharist is how hard Poussin worked to get the history right. Instead of seating the apostles at a table, as nearly every earlier Last Supper had, he set them reclining on a low Roman couch beneath a hanging lamp, the way people actually dined in the first century. Of the seven pictures one, the Penance, burned in a fire at Belvoir Castle in England in 1816. This Eucharist outlived a long line of owners, and the National Gallery, where it had hung on loan, finally bought it in 2024.