Considered to be France's greatest 17th-century artist, Nicolas Poussin is chiefly famous for his classical masterpieces. Highly choreographed scenes drawn from the Bible, ancient history and myth, framed with impeccably realised architectural detail, their stage-set grandeur ushered in the French classical tradition and caused Bernini - whose sensuous, incandescent, wilfully imperfect, baroque vision was Poussin's polar opposite - to say that the Frenchman's talent made him "realise that I know nothing".

However, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions , which brings together 40 paintings and an equal number of drawings, is the first dedicated to Poussin's work as a landscape artist. The unremark-able works in the first gallery make the lack of attention perfectly understand-able. The magnificence of the later rooms makes it astonishing.