The Inspiration of the Poet
Artist	Nicolas Poussin
Year	1629–1630
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	183 cm × 213 cm (72 in × 84 in)
Location	Louvre, Paris

The Inspiration of the Poet is an oil-on-canvas in the classical style by the artist Nicolas Poussin, painted between 1629 and 1630. It is held and exhibited at the Louvre, in Paris.

The painting seems to be the one which was in the Cardinal Mazarin Collection in 1653.

It was given to Louis XIV in 1693, together with its companion piece, A Seaport, by the French architect and gardener André Le Nôtre. It was acquired by the Louvre in 1911.^[1]

The painting depicts Apollo, accompanied by infant Cupids and by one of the Muses, about to crown a poet who is writing under his inspiration. It is not known to what the painting alludes, nor what is its exact subject. Perhaps the latter was always indefinite, because the picture appears in Mazarin's inventory of 1653 as Apollo with a Muse and a Poet crowned with Laurels. Its warm colouring reveals the Titianesque strain in Poussin's work; it must have been painted during his first Roman period, at the end of the 1620s. Several other paintings of this period are related to this work: The Inspiration of Anacreon, the Parnassus, and the book frontispiece drawn by Poussin and engraved by Claude Mellan for an edition of Virgil published by the Imprimerie Royale in 1641–1642.^[2]

Some critics put forward the hypothesis that the model for the Muse, often recognizable in other works of this period by Poussin, may have been Anna Dughet, whom he married in 1630 at San Lorenzo in Lucina (Rome).^[3]

• List of paintings by Nicolas Poussin
• Baroque
• Et in Arcadia ego
• History of painting
• Western painting

• Baer, Curtis O. (1963), "An Essay on Poussin", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 21 (3), Blackwell Publishing: 251–261, doi:10.2307/427435, JSTOR 427435
• Bätschmann, Oskar (1999), Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting, Reaktion Books, ISBN 0-948462-43-4
• Carrier, David (1993), Poussin's paintings: a study in art-historical methodology, Penn State Press, ISBN 0-271-00816-4
• Clark, Kenneth (1961), Landscape into art, Beacon Press
• Haggard, Patrick; Rodgers, Sam (2000), "The movement disorder of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)", Movement Disorders, 15 (2): 328–334, doi:10.1002/1531-8257(200003)15:2<328::AID-MDS1021>3.0.CO;2-Y, PMID 10752587, S2CID 43216258, archived from the original on 2013-01-05
• McTighe, Sheila (1996), Nicolas Poussin's Landscape Allegories, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-48214-3
• Mérot, Alain (1990), Nicolas Poussin, Abbeville Press, ISBN 1-55859-120-6
• F. Negri Arnoldi, Storia dell'Arte, Fabbri Group (1990), Vol.III, ISBN 978-88-450-0735-4
• Scott, Katie; Warwick, Genevieve (1998), Commemorating Poussin: Reception and Interpretation of the Artist, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-64004-0
• Sohm, Philip Lindsay (2007), The artist grows old: the aging of art and artists in Italy, 1500-1800, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-12123-0, Chapter 3. Poussin's hands and Titian's eyes
• Verdi, Richard; Rosenberg, Pierre (1995), Nicolas Poussin 1584-1665, Royal Academy, ISBN 0-302-00656-7

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Inspiration of the Poet by Nicolas Poussin (Louvre RF 1774).

• L'Inspiration du poète at the Louvre
• Nicolas Poussin Biography, Style and Artworks
• Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• 92 works by Nicolas Poussin
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Nicolas Poussin" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.