Poussinists and Rubenists

Poussinistes) who were a group of French artists, named after the painter Nicolas Poussin, who believed that drawing was the most important thing.

After over forty years the final resolution of the matter in favor of the Rubenists was signalled when Antoine Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera was accepted as his reception piece by the French Academy in 1717.

The Poussinists believed in the Platonic idea of the existence in the mind of ideal objects that could be reconstructed in concrete form by the selection, using reason, of elements from nature.

Their leader was Charles Le Brun[3] (died 1690), Director of the Academy, and their heroes were Raphael, the Carracci, and Poussin himself,[1] whose severe and stoical works exemplified their philosophy.

Michael Levey has pointed out that it was during the seventeenth century that the new categories of genre, landscape and still life had become established with their emphasis on the observation of nature, and therefore the arguments of the Rubenists amounted to a revival of existing traditions of naturalism and a call for a greater discipline in painting rather than representing an attitude of general licence or laissez-faire as is sometimes assumed.

[5] The argument also took place during the beginning of the Enlightenment and the Rubenists found support in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which argued that all ideas derived from experience and that none were innate.