Bacchanal with a Lute Player

By 1627 Poussin was a Frenchman making his way in Rome, where he would spend nearly all his working life. This comes from his early years there, and you can see what he had been looking at. Titian's great mythological Bacchanals, painted a century before for the Duke of Ferrara, had come to Rome and hung in a cardinal's collection, and the young Poussin studied them closely. Here he builds his own version, a warm sunlit revel with Bacchus, a lute player and dancers among the trees. The mood is sensuous and the colour frankly Venetian. Within a few years his art would cool into the measured, sober classicism he is best known for now, yet here he is still enjoying the wine and the movement, the figures caught mid-dance under one broad-leaved tree.