The Ecstasy of St Paul

The commission came from Paul Scarron, a Paris poet famous for burlesque verse and by then so disabled by illness that he worked from a chair. He asked through Poussin's friend Chantelou and was turned down several times. Poussin wrote back from Rome that he hoped the whim would pass, and that his painting would please Scarron no more than Scarron's burlesque pleased him. He agreed in January 1649, the month the royal court slipped out of Paris at night and the army blockaded the city in the first war of the Fronde. The canvas reached Scarron in 1650. Poussin had already painted Saint Paul carried up by three angels once before, in 1643, for Chantelou himself, and that earlier version is now in Sarasota, Florida. The Louvre keeps two sets of measurements for this one, 148 by 120 centimetres for Poussin's canvas and 193 by 160 once later hands had enlarged it.