La Sainte Famille avec saint Jean

In 1628 Poussin got the commission every painter in Rome wanted, an altarpiece for St Peter's, and it did not make his name. Soon after he fell seriously ill, and he came out of it done with chasing public work, settling instead into small canvases for private collectors. This Holy Family belongs to that turn, painted around 1628 or 1629. For generations it was known only through a print made after it by the engraver Guillaume Chasteau, and the painting itself surfaced when the Pearson collection was auctioned in 1927. Anthony Blunt and Jacques Thuillier, the scholars who shaped the modern view of Poussin, accepted it as his. In 1980 Doris Wild argued instead for Charles Mellin, another French painter then working in Rome, and most specialists have not followed her.