Le Sacrement de l'Extrême-Onction

Poussin had got out of Paris in 1642 after two miserable years running the crown's art projects, and back in Rome a French royal official named Chantelou asked him for copies of an earlier set of seven Sacraments. Poussin declined to repeat himself and invented seven new compositions instead. This one was finished in 1644. He gives the last rites as they might have looked in a Roman house of the early centuries, a lamp burning, the household gathered at the bed, a priest performing the anointing, and he worked from ancient furniture and funerary custom to get the room right. The set reached Britain in 1798, when the Orleans family's paintings were auctioned in London after the Revolution, and it has hung in Edinburgh since 1945.