The Return of the Holy Family to Nazareth (c. 1627): Art, History and Details

The Return of the Holy Family to Nazareth (c. 1627) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

When King Herod learned that he would lose his throne to a child born in Bethlehem, he ordered all male infants to be massacred. Mary and Joseph thus fled to Egypt to protect their son, Jesus. The age of the boy in this painting suggests that Poussin depicted the less-common subject of the Holy Family’s return from Egypt. Jesus reaches toward a vision of a cross borne by angels, a reference to both his eventual crucifixion and Herod’s cruel slaughter of innocent children.

Object facts

• Title: The Return of the Holy Family to Nazareth
• Date: c. 1627
• Creator attribution: Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 159.5 x 124 x 14.5 cm (62 13/16 x 48 13/16 x 5 11/16 in.); Unframed: 134 x 99 cm (52 3/4 x 39 in.)
• Collection: P - French 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1953.156

A detail from the museum

Nicolas Poussin used wax figures and wetted paper or fabric to model the bodies in his paintings, helping him to capture the realistic folds, movement, and balance of light and shadow.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Gerald Stiebel, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, Sept. 19, 2013, in CMA curatorial file.
• Gerald Stiebel, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, June 26, 2013, in CMA curatorial file.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.