L'inverno

Poussin was near 70 and his hands shook when he painted this, one of four canvases on the seasons he made in his last years for the young Duc de Richelieu. He gave winter the darkest subject he could find: Noah's flood, from Genesis, the world going under. Lightning splits a black sky, figures cling to rocks and a floating plank, a snake slides across the stones in the foreground, and far off, small and calm, Noah's ark rides the water. He finished the series around 1664 and died the next year. Painters of the following century, reaching for storms and disasters of their own, kept coming back to this drowned grey world.