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Painting as a Way of Life

Philosophy and Practice in French Art, 1620–1660

Neer uncovers a key moment in the history of early modern art, when painting was understood to be a tool for self-transformation and for living a philosophical life. 
 
In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer shows how French painters of the seventeenth century developed radically new ways to connect art, perception, and ethics. Cutting across traditional boundaries of classicism and realism, Neer addresses four case studies: Nicolas Poussin, renowned for marrying ancient philosophy and narrative painting; Louise Moillon, who pioneered French still life in the 1630s; Georges de La Tour, a painter of intense and introspective nocturnes; and the Brothers Le Nain, specialists in genre and portraiture who inspired Courbet, Manet, and other painters of modern life. Setting these artists in dialogue with Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, and others, ranging from the studios of Rome to the streets of Paris, this book provides fresh accounts of essential artworks—some well-known, others neglected—and new ways to approach the relation of art, theory, and daily life. 
 

352 pages | 104 color plates, 2 line drawings | 7 x 10 | © 2025

Art: Art--General Studies, European Art

Reviews

Painting as a Way of Life is at once a major transformative study of Poussin and other seventeenth-century French artists, and a vital book for art and intellectual historians. Neer rejects the retrojection of divisions between theory and practice, philosophy and artisanship onto seventeenth-century French painters, showing instead how to look at the interrelationship of painting as both practice and philosophy.”

Matthew L. Jones, Princeton University

“Neer proposes a startling new way of looking at and understanding Poussin and seventeenth-century French painting more broadly, centering on an understanding of painting as practical wisdom rather than theory. Interrogating a key period associated with the rise of absolutism and the emergence of the academies in France, Neer challenges conventional notions of regularization and theorization that have been used to define classical French art. Rich and intellectually compelling, Painting as a Way of Life is marked by quality of its scholarship and its innovative methodology that bridges the domains of seventeenth-century French art, history, philosophy, and literature.”

Dalia Judovitz, Emory University

“Scholars have long seen Nicolas Poussin as the Cartesian champion of an abstract, rule-based, system-building approach to art. Neer’s brilliant new book liberates the seventeenth-century master from the classical art theory constructed by the generation that came after him. This transformative and audacious study rediscovers the artist for whom painting is a philosophical practice capable of changing us. Neer reckons with the peculiarities and strangeness of Poussin’s art and makes us see familiar paintings anew, even as he provides us with tools for reassessing the works of his contemporaries from different traditions.”

Hall Bjørnstad, Indiana University Bloomington

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction. Before Theory: Painting and Philosophical Practice

Part I: Poussin’s Classicism
Chapter One. Poussin’s Self-Portraits and the Dream of Classical Theory
Chapter Two. Poussin’s Philosophy
Chapter Three. Poussin’s Practice
Chapter Four. Landscape and Disproportion

Part II: Realism, Acuity, and Metaphor
Chapter Five. Discerning Eyes: Louise Moillon, Still-Life, and Genre
Chapter Six. Corporeality and Metaphor in La Tour and Le Nain
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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