Bacchanal Scene

In 1806 Napoleon's army took Hesse-Kassel, and the next year the territory became a kingdom for his younger brother Jérôme. The picture gallery the local rulers had built up was one of the richest in Germany, and a large part of it went to Paris. This Poussin hung there in the Musée Napoléon, the Louvre under its imperial name, until 1815 brought it back. Landgrave Wilhelm VIII had bought it before 1749, and it was already old then: Poussin painted it in Rome in the 1620s, in his thirties, when he was working through Titian's bacchanals and making small mythologies for a handful of Roman collectors. Who the two figures are has never been settled, usually read as a satyr and a nymph.