Painting as a Way of Life: Philosophy and Practice in French Art, 1620-1660

by Richard Neer

Overview

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. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226835495
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/07/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of numerous books and articles on classical art, cinema, art theory and French painting, including The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture. In 2022 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 

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

Editorial Reviews

"Where do we go from here, when it feels as if truth itself is receding out of reach? Thanks to Neer, I now see our collective condition in Nicolas Poussin’s 1658 depiction of the blinded giant Orion seeking the healing rays of the sun to restore his sight. Yet the painting contains two conflicting sources of light, implying a tragic irony: He cannot know whether he’s getting closer to his cure or farther from it.
Neer’s book speaks to our troubled time by casting seventeenth—century painting as a spiritual exercise, an ancient conception (revived by intellectual historian Michel Foucault) of philosophical activity not as a mode of thinking but as an art of living. Likewise, philosophical painting does not illustrate truthful ideas but rather inculcates habits of truth—seeking. 
Most remarkably, Painting as a Way of Life embodies the virtues it describes. Interpretations that aspire toward correctness end the quest for truth: When we find the answer, we can stop looking. Neer instead values recognition and discernment."
 

Artforum, on the "Best of 2025: The Critics’ Critics" - Harmon Siegel

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

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

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