Nymph with Satyrs

Poussin was in his early thirties and about three years into his life in Rome when he painted this, around 1627. He had no regular patron yet, and that may be why he took on erotic subjects like this one, pictures that could appeal to a wide range of buyers. A pale nymph lies in the foreground, asleep or perhaps only lost in herself. A satyr, part man and part goat, leans in and draws her thin white robe away, a golden-haired child watches from beside her, and a second satyr smiles out from behind the tree. In ancient Roman art satyrs were lustful, drunken woodland gods. Earlier writers tried to name the scene, as Jupiter and the nymph Antiope, or as a satyr surprising the sleeping Venus, but the details fit neither story exactly, and the National Gallery leaves it unnamed.