A Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term

Nicolas Poussin painted this in Rome around 1632, a French artist who had gone to Italy to steep himself in the ancient world. It shows nymphs and fauns dancing in a ring before a term, one of those old boundary posts carved as a bearded god and set at the edge of a field. The bodies are fuller and more solid than in his earlier Bacchic scenes, and the dancers are arranged in a shallow line, like carved figures running along the side of a Roman stone coffin. That was deliberate. Poussin spent his days drawing exactly those sarcophagi in Roman collections. One nymph squeezes grape juice onto two struggling boys while a third has already drunk himself to sleep. The picture has hung in London's National Gallery since 1826.