The Holy Family with Saint John Saint Elizabeth and Saint Joseph Praying

Joseph stands at the back with his eyes closed and his hands pressed together in prayer. Nowhere else in Poussin's work does he appear like this, and it turns a gathering of the Virgin, Saint Elizabeth and the two children into something close to an image for private devotion. The town behind them is unusual as well. Its gabled houses look French or Flemish, and the Louvre's catalogue wonders whether the patron, perhaps a man named Joseph, wanted his home town in it. Poussin's biographer Félibien recorded a picture with these figures in 1656, but laboratory study points to about 1650, since the canvas shares its red-then-grey preparation with another Holy Family of those years. Look at the two infants too. The Christ Child on his mother's lap is painted in cooler, almost bluish flesh beside the warm skin of John.