Fauns and Nymphs

Around the turn of the century, while the painters Roussel worked beside were filling their canvases with lamplit Paris rooms and patterned wallpaper, he kept wandering off into an imagined Mediterranean wood. Its inhabitants are here: fauns, the half-goat companions of the wine god Bacchus, and nymphs, the young nature spirits of Greek myth, gathered among trees with no particular story attached. He painted them not on canvas but on cardboard, the cheap absorbent surface a painter reaches for to work fast or try an idea out. Roussel spent much of his life on large decorative panels for the walls of houses and public buildings, and small pieces like this were often where those wall-sized scenes began, their colour and their crowd of bodies tested at arm's length before being scaled up. The paint sits thin and matte here, closer to the chalky bloom of pastel than to the gloss of a finished picture. He worked in both, oil and pastel, and often let the one behave like the other.