In early 2012, Object Lessons: France in the Golden Age showcased a concentration of five French seventeenth-century paintings as the first in a series of small displays of art called "Object Lessons."
This inaugural grouping was mounted on the occasion of the loan of Nicolas Poussin’s The Holy Family Returning to Nazareth from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Poussin’s painting was generously sent to San Diego in exchange for the Timken’s Rembrandt, Saint Bartholomew, which was part of the major exhibition Rembrandt in America on view in Cleveland in 2012.
In honor of this important loan, the Timken arranged for the painting to be shown alongside four paintings by Poussin's contemporaries: the Timken's own Christ Healing the Blind (1655-60) by Philippe de Champaigne, its Pastoral Landscape (1646-47) by Claude Lorrain, as well as the San Diego Museum of Art's Aeneas and his Father Fleeing Troy (ca. 1635) by Simon Vouet and The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist in a Classical Landscape (ca. 1645) attributed to Nicolas or Pierre Mignard and generously lent from a private collection in San Diego.