Et in Arcadia ego (The Arcadian Shepherds)

About this work

Artist

Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)

Year

c. 1637–1638

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

85 × 121 cm

Collection

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Movement

Baroque

Three shepherds and a woman in classical dress gather around a plain stone tomb in an idealised landscape, one of them tracing with his finger the inscription Et in Arcadia ego, which can be read as the dead man saying that he too once lived in Arcadia, or as Death announcing that even in Arcadia he is present. Poussin painted it in Rome around 1637 to 1638 for Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope Clement IX; an earlier, more Baroque version of 1627 is at Chatsworth. The later picture is calm and geometric, the figures contemplative, the standing woman modelled on an antique statue known as the Cesi Juno. Louis XIV bought it in 1685 and hung it in his private apartment at Versailles, and it entered the Louvre in 1816. Erwin Panofsky's two essays on the ambiguity of its inscription, in 1936 and 1955, made it the most discussed sentence in art history.

This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.