"Where do we go from here, when it feels as if truth itself is receding out of reach? Thanks to Neer, I now see our collective condition in Nicolas Poussins 1658 depiction of the blinded giant Orion seeking the healing rays of the sun to restore his sight. Yet the painting contains two conflicting sources of light, implying a tragic irony: He cannot know whether hes getting closer to his cure or farther from it. Neers book speaks to our troubled time by casting seventeenth-century painting as a spiritual exercise, an ancient conception (revived by intellectual historian Michel Foucault) of philosophical activity not as a mode of thinking but as an art of living. Likewise, philosophical painting does not illustrate truthful ideas but rather inculcates habits of truth-seeking. Most remarkably, Painting as a Way of Life embodies the virtues it describes. Interpretations that aspire toward correctness end the quest for truth: When we find the answer, we can stop looking. Neer instead values recognition and discernment." -- Harmon Siegel * Artforum, on the "Best of 2025: The Critics Critics" * Painting as a Way of Life is a wide-ranging study of how 17th-century French painters pursued the 'cultivation of perceptual virtue.' . . . Painting as a Way of Life is a refreshing account of essential artworks, and provides an enlightening perspective on a pivotal point in the history of French painting. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. * CHOICE * Painting as a Way of Life is at once a major transformative study of Poussin and other seventeenth-century French artists, and a vital book for art and intellectual historians. Neer rejects the retrojection of divisions between theory and practice, philosophy and artisanship onto seventeenth-century French painters, showing instead how to look at the interrelationship of painting as both practice and philosophy. -- Matthew L. Jones, Princeton University Neer proposes a startling new way of looking at and understanding Poussin and seventeenth-century French painting more broadly, centering on an understanding of painting as practical wisdom rather than theory. Interrogating a key period associated with the rise of absolutism and the emergence of the academies in France, Neer challenges conventional notions of regularization and theorization that have been used to define classical French art. Rich and intellectually compelling, Painting as a Way of Life is marked by quality of its scholarship and its innovative methodology that bridges the domains of seventeenth-century French art, history, philosophy, and literature. -- Dalia Judovitz, Emory University Scholars have long seen Nicolas Poussin as the Cartesian champion of an abstract, rule-based, system-building approach to art. Neers brilliant new book liberates the seventeenth-century master from the classical art theory constructed by the generation that came after him. This transformative and audacious study rediscovers the artist for whom painting is a philosophical practice capable of changing us. Neer reckons with the peculiarities and strangeness of Poussins art and makes us see familiar paintings anew, even as he provides us with tools for reassessing the works of his contemporaries from different traditions. -- Hall Bjørnstad, Indiana University Bloomington
