Paysage avec un homme puisant de l'eau dans un ruisseau

Poussin painted this around 1637 in Rome, where he had lived for 13 years and where his reputation had grown large enough to be inconvenient. Within three years Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII had summoned him back to Paris to take charge of decorating the royal buildings, a job he disliked and walked away from. None of that pressure shows here. A sandy track winds off through low hills towards distant mountains, an old man in blue sits in the foreground with a sack and a water bottle beside him, and a younger man crouches at the pool, scooping water up with a broken piece of pottery. No text has ever been traced behind the scene, though it echoes the story told of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who threw away his drinking cup after watching a boy drink from his cupped hands. The hills and the small town behind come from the country around Rome, where Poussin walked and made studies.