Poussin as a dead albatross

Much as I love his work now, I came to Poussin unwillingly. I must have said this in lectures & seminars many times, but I don’t remember putting it in writing publicly. & now, after more than 40 years, I would like to be rid of any further need to write about his art. Poussin has been for a long time a dead albatross round my neck, because, for many reasons, what I have discovered is either unpublished, or not sufficiently interesting to me to want to write about it. & unpublished, because I have never cared for writing articles for magazines, especially when these magazines seemed devoted to kinds of art-writing that did not suit my interests. I always wanted to write books & books on Poussin are remarkably uneconomic,as I discovered when I published my book on the Seven Sacraments paintings. So now I go round tidying up what I have left untidily in odd corners of notebooks & manuscripts. While I was eating my lunch, I thought it would be a good idea to make public some of the material from my PhD thesis of 1968. I am not going to alter the original text, but I think I’m entitled to insert here & there notes, revisions of hindsight.

I am doing this because I left

Edinburgh

for

Auckland

, NZ, Aotearoa, shortly after completing the thesis for the University there. There was at that time only the briefest & most fugitive public information about

Edinburgh

theses. I doubt whether more than half a dozen people have ever read it – 2 examiners, both now deceased, probably it, at least in part, possibly Matthias Bruhn, my fellow researcher on the Sacraments paintings, possibly, though I doubt it, Pierre Rosenberg, to whom I sent a copy in 1993 or 4, & maybe a couple more unknown to me. There never was, to my knowledge a microfilm of it, nor photocopy of it. & strangely, my own copy, the 2^nd carbon, with additional notes in the margin, is incomplete: I couldn’t afford a set of photographs after paying typist and binder. This has had lasting frustrating effect, because there were many photos in there of which I didn’t own negatives, and which had been specially taken for it, of book illustrations.

I did incorporate most of the useful information from the thesis into the book I published 32 years later in 2000. But there is still a certain amount that I have never seen into print [or onto the internet]. In 1968 the parts that I was most interested in were Chapter III “Poussin’s sources for the Sacraments” and Chapter IV, the last, Ceremony & Setting in the Sacraments. I had drafted the earlier chapters in previous years and all that I had to do in 1968 was to tidy them and write footnotes. In the thesis, from the beginning, I had been determined to show that Poussin’s paintings were deeply engaged with the religious side of 17^th century culture. This immediately went against the every one of the currents of thought about Poussin in the 1950s and 1960s. My researches showed that his Sacraments paintings were not merely antiquarian exercises for their own sake, nor simply accountable as classical and especially Stoic thought, nor yet simply as abstract formalism. How, I wondered, could the Sacraments painting be seen in these ways, if the surface content they presented were to be taken into account. I investigated that content and its sources both literary and pictorial and found that there was in all probability a decisively relevant context for the paintings content in Counter-Reformation religious thought, though at that time, this had been entirely discounted or ignored.

My leaving

Edinburgh

in 1969 did mean that a decade later when the National Gallery of Scotland put on an exhibition in 1980, I was so safely out of sight, that nobody there  chose either to consult my thesis or to consult me. When I found out about the exhibition I was even too late to buy a copy of the catalogue [soon out-of-print]. However, there was almost nothing in the writing that appeared with the exhibition that was not in large degree a disappointing repetition of the previous literature. Subsequently, Paola Santucci’s book, “Poussin: Tradizione Ermetica e Classicismo Gesuita” 1985, IO/17, ISBN 88-85651-06-2, goes a long way, & often in interesting detail, to substantiate a similar argument. But even now it is perhaps not fully realized how much of the Counter-Reformation found its way into the religious paintings of the classical Poussin.

The 74 pages of Ch IV : the place to begin. Watch this space.

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