'Poussin and the Dance' at the National Gallery

There's a small exhibition at the National Gallery at the moment about Poussin's dance paintings in the ground floor galleries. I'm not a huge fan of Poussin or that 'French academic' style he inspired but he is a great painter. He left France for Rome in the 1620s and that is where he studied the antiquities there, the statues and other objects, seeing how the artists of the past portrayed movement in stone and that's what he tried to reproduce in these paintings. 

The exhibition probably contains more sketches and drawings than it does paintings, but that's bonus for me. I love seeing great painter's drawings and preliminary sketches, see how they played around with positioning characters in the scenes of the paintings and how they might've changed their minds. I find it all rather fascinating. Poussin seems to have preferred ink for his drawings which gives nice lines and makes them longer lasting. I think my favourite was a study for 'Dance to the Music of Time', a detail from the painting which is the poster for the exhibition.

I admit to not paying much attention to most of the paintings on show - that's pretty, that's colourful - but three paintings that did grab my attention were all painted for Cardinal Richelieu and they were hung together, the 'Triumph of...' Pan, Silenus and Bacchus. Each of them are rather raucous scenes of drunken debauchery as you'd expect from the protagonists. There's a lot going on in these paintings and they're full of movement with lots of dancing, leering, drunken collapses, people loosing their clothes, they're joyous celebrations of life. Look at the detail in the paintings and decide what's happening, like in the 'Triumph of Pan' one man is trying to pull a satyr to his feet after he's drunkenly collapsed - who would put that at the front of a painting? Poussin, obviously.

Apparently, the urn just in front of the pair is a copy of an actual urn that was recently found and was creating a stir in academic circles at the time.

The final painting of the show is 'Dance to the Music of Time' on loan from the Wallace Collection for the first time, and it gets a room to itself. It's a very allegorical painting and is, oddly, quite relaxing. It shows Time playing his lyre and Poverty, Labour, Wealth and Pleasure holding hands and dancing together. Unlike the other paintings, there isn't a crowd around them, just them in a pastoral landscape. Above them in the clouds, we see Apollo and Dawn crossing the sky.

The exhibition was quite busy when I was there so I'll go back again in a few weeks time when it should be calmer. I'd like the opportunity to see the three 'Triumph' paintings again to focus on the detail.