Poussin and the Dance

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time, ca. 1634-36, The Wallace Collection, London.

Poussin and the Dance is the first exhibition at the National Gallery in London devoted to Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century master of French Baroque. It’s also the first ever exhibition to focus on Poussin’s pictures of dancers and revellers, showing a different side to the artist often characterised as cold and intellectual. The exhibition, organised with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, includes his best-known painting, A Dance to the Music of Time (usually on display in London’s Wallace Collection). It also features hiss drawings and some of the antique sculpture he studied, inviting us trace the evolution of his ideas from marble to paper to paint.