Landscape with the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion, 1648 Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Nicolas Poussin also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Landscape with the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

In the lower right, a woman kneels on bare earth, her blue skirt pooled like a small tide against the dust. She is busy with something almost nothing at all – a pinch of ash, a few fragments – yet the whole painted world seems to hold its breath around her.

Nicolas Poussin sets this quiet act inside a landscape that looks composed for eternity. Massive trees stand like sentries on either side, their dark foliage knitted into rounded clumps. Between them opens a sunlit middle ground: a shallow river, a bridge, a scatter of ochre roofs, and a pale temple set up on a rise as if it were the scene’s moral backbone. Beyond, a rocky outcrop lifts and breaks the sky. Nature and architecture sit in a poised truce, but it is not a comforting one.

The story, once you know it, pricks the calm. Phocion, the Athenian general, has been executed after a false charge of treason; his body burned outside the city walls. Here, in Landscape with the Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion, his widow gathers what she is not supposed to gather, helped by a companion who turns her head as though she has heard a twig snap. Look into the grove nearby and you can make out the spying youth – a small, almost swallowed figure – tucked into the shade. That sliver of threat changes everything: the air feels cooler, the silence more weighted, like a pause before footsteps.

Poussin’s paint is wonderfully controlled, but never dead. In the shadowed foreground the brushwork runs in fine, parallel strokes, as if the ground has been combed. In the distance, the buildings are laid in with thin, luminous layers, giving stone a dry, sun-warmed clarity. This is classical order with a pulse, closer in spirit to Claude’s measured Arcadias than to any Baroque theatrics.

Perhaps that is the most unsettling thing. Human grief happens here as a small, illegal movement on a vast stage. The rocks tower, the city carries on, and the women must keep their heads down. Standing before it at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, one might imagine the faint rasp of ash against cloth – and feel how courage can be almost invisible.