La Sacra Famiglia con san Giovanni e santa Elisabetta in un paesaggio

While this was being painted, around 1650 and 1651, France was in the middle of the Fronde, the run of revolts that put princes and the Paris parlement in arms against the government of a boy king. Poussin was nowhere near it. He had gone back to Rome in 1642 after two unhappy years working for Louis XIII in Paris, stayed there for the rest of his life, and sent his pictures north to French clients. This is one of five Holy Families he made between 1648 and 1651, each of them with Elizabeth and the young John the Baptist added to the group. It may have been ordered by Marie de Castille, wife of Nicolas Fouquet, who would later become Louis XIV's superintendent of finances and then his prisoner. The king bought the painting in 1685 and hung it in his private apartment at Versailles.