Landscape with two nymphs

Poussin painted this late, around 1659, when he was in his mid-sixties and long settled in Rome. By then his hand shook with a tremor that makes his last canvases looser and stranger than his crisp earlier work. He seems to have made it for a fellow painter, Charles Le Brun, who ran the arts under Louis XIV. Two nymphs recline beside a lake and a great stone urn, and they have turned to look at a very large snake coiled nearby, close but posing no real threat. The exact story has never been pinned down. The landscape itself takes over the picture, its calm order owing far more to Poussin's idea of nature than to any real corner of the Roman countryside.