In a few short(ish) weeks the majority of undergraduates will return to their homes for the Christmas holidays, but whether you are a fresher full of tales of anxiety-ridden Cindies high jinks, or a weary, knowing third year who hasn’t seen daylight since October, you may perhaps struggle to shake off the ‘tunnel vision’ that is imposed upon us by life at Cambridge. In our rush to make deadlines, attend deadly supervisions and consume inordinate amounts of Caffè Nero lattes, there can be no denying that we put ourselves first and forget that this city will go on without us when we pack our suitcases.

Tourists will continue to be ripped off by punters, the Trailer of Life will sell marginally fewer cheesy chips, but ultimately: very little will change. This is the message promoted by Nicolas Poussin’s painting, Extreme Unction, from 1638-40, which has just been acquired by our very own Fitzwilliam Museum, following a nationwide campaign to raise the requisite £3.68 million. Despite his dramatic use of chiaroscuro, Poussin’s painting is a remarkably stoic image of a man on the verge of death – grey and bloodless at the centre of the canvas.

Typically, Poussin has a reputation for being a ‘difficult artist’, because his paintings do not often prove easy to engage with immediately. His compositions often deny his viewer intimacy – either because the human figures are small or because, as in the case of this picture, Poussin deliberately turns their backs to us. The language of his work is also largely classical, designed to appeal to an elite, erudite audience. Yet in Extreme Unction, we are faced with a universal theme: the inevitability of our own death and decay, which needs no audio guide to explain...

The features of many of the faces are obscured by shadow, but this in fact helps the viewer to insert themselves into the scene; we are made fearful because we could be any one of the figures at some point in our lives. There is a space between the kneeling figure in white and the front of the picture plane, suggesting that we ourselves are meant to fill the composition and share in the demonstration of grief.
One face, however, seeks to distract us from the dark, austere room: that of a servant girl on the far right. She is smirking. Her half-smile tells us that whilst she is aware of the upsetting scene being acted out at the dying man’s bedside, ultimately, she has carried out her duty and is free to leave.

On exiting the room, her young life will go on, whilst the old man’s will not. The girl is here to remind the viewer that life is a cyclical process, a truth that would have been easier for Poussin’s contemporary viewers to appreciate, due to their lower life expectancy, than perhaps it is for us today. When we leave the ivory towers of Cambridge and go out and get real jobs – which to my mind is so frightening an idea as to be akin to death – many more as yet unknown bodies will fill the benches in hall, and sleep in ‘our’ rooms, and read ‘our’ books.

Campaigns such as those successfully run by the Art Fund, the Monument Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund to secure Extreme Unction are all the more important as they have ensured the legacy of one of the nation’s most invaluable assets. Not only is this painting useful for the art-historical education of future students, it is also humbling to behold. While attempting not to preach, it seems as if we could all remember to be a little more humble whilst stomping around our gilded medieval playground.

Nicolas Poussin’s Extreme Unction (1638-40) will go on special display in the Octagon Gallery of the Fitzwilliam Museum from early December.