New Canaan, Conn.—In February, as a major exhibition of Nicolas Poussin opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the 17th-century master’s least-frequently seen works was in the final stages of conservation at the New York studio of restorer Luca Bonetti. By early April, it was back home in, of all places, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, just in time for the historic structure’s seasonal re-opening to the public.

Poussin’s "Burial of Phocion" (1648) is the only painting ever displayed in the architect’s famously minimalist dwelling, and at first glance it’s hard to imagine a connection between Johnson, celebrated for his contributions to late 20th-century urban iconography, and the artist credited with establishing the classical tradition in French painting. Johnson purchased the landscape in 1945 for $4,500, at the suggestion of his longtime friend, Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. Setting the piece on a special stand he designed, Johnson positioned it amid Mies van der Rohe chairs, adjacent to the conversation area in his home’s unfettered 1,728-square-foot expanse.

Because of its open-to-the-elements design and lack of temperature control, the Glass House (completed in 1949) is a particularly inhospitable environment for a painting. Years of streaming sunlight had blanched the varnish of the Poussin so badly that the faces were barely discernible, and staff members at the house were afraid that even walking past it could cause paint to flake off. Bonetti, who also worked on restoring St. Paul’s Chapel in Manhattan after 9/11, says his efforts have rendered the canvas "stable and more readable."

Poussin’s carefully orchestrated landscape, with its temples and funeral procession, is based on Plutarch’s account of an Athenian general falsely accused of treason and forced to drink hemlock juice. This scene depicts Phocion’s final humiliation—burial outside the city. One of three Poussin works on this subject (another was in the Met show, which closed in May), the canvas was the backdrop for conversations between Johnson and such art luminaries as Andy Warhol and Frank Stella. While Johnson and his partner David Whitney—who both died in 2005—collected works by these and other contemporaries, none of those were ever hung in the Glass House.

Records do not reveal any discussion of the painting’s role in its architectural context, but Johnson’s longtime friend Robert A. M. Stern, founder of the New York architecture firm that bears his name, believes "it was deliberately an effort to put on display a painting that suggests the ideal of the Arcadian nature of the landscape itself."

Vincent Scully, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Art History at Yale, whom Johnson called "the most influential architectural teacher ever," found Johnson "unfailingly intelligent" during visits to the Glass House. Similarly, after Bernini looked at some Poussin paintings, he tapped his head and said, "Poussin is an artist who paints from here."
 
Keith Christiansen, the Met’s Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings and organizer of the recent show, is more dismissive: "Perhaps it was no more than the fact that in the 1950s, Poussin was a darling of sophisticated taste." He doubts that the choice of the Poussin had any connection with the work’s "political-moral lesson." Scully has a more personal view: "Phocion and Philip were both oligarchs."