NICOLAS POUSSIN. Text Volume, 90s net. Critical Catalogue and Illustrations, two Vols.,(partly in Collaboration with the Bollingen Series, New York) by Anthony BluntReview by: F. J. B. WATSONJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 116, No. 5144 (JULY 1968), pp. 704-706Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41371927 .

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 968 and which have now become obsolete, are still in use. The draw loom, in which the draw boy sits above the loom while manipulating the pattern harness, has not been used in China or the West on a commercial basis since the nineteenth century, when it was replaced by the Jacquard system. Yet draw looms (of which an illustration is given) existed in Tehran and Isfahan as recently as 1963. Similarly, the wheelwright's craft and the Persian carpenter's use of the adze seem to belong more to the nineteenth-century England of George Sturt.

Dr. Rosenfield's book deals with an important and complex period in the history of the area now covered roughly by North-west India, West Pakistan and Afghanistan. During this time the results of the Kushan invasions had a certain catalytic effect on the cultures which they annexed, cultures which fell each side of the watershed between East and West.

The Kushan period has left behind a considerable amount of material remains which are distributed among a series of sites, most of which lie along a line running from Kabul in the North-west to Sarnath in the South-east. For one person to do justice to this material would imply his competence in the fields of numismatics, epigraphy, the history of religion, art history and archaeology, and the linguistic ability to deal at first hand with texts originating from Rome, Greece, Iran, India and China. Clearly this is an impossibility, which the author acknowledges. Instead, he has summarized most of the available information in the more important fields. He draws attention to the evidence of phases of Kushan portraiture provided by coins and sculpture, and the problems created by the apparently eclectic attitude which the Kushans had towards religion. In addition he discusses questions arising from the conflicting evidence provided by the Kanishka casket and sets out the arguments for the various theories relating to the dates of Kanishka's reign. In choosing what emphasis to give to some aspects of this vast amount of data Dr. Rosenfield has shown a deep understanding of his subject. As a result he has provided a useful research tool for all students of the Kushan period.

JOHN LOWRY

Nicolas Poussin. By Anthony Blunt. Text Volume , 905 net. Critical Catalogue and Illustrations, two Vols ., £9 together . London , Phaidon (partly in collaboration zvith the Bollingen Series, New York), 1967-8.

Sir Anthony Blunt is the leading authority on Poussin of our day. He tells us in his Preface that he first became interested in the artist as a schoolboy. Ever since his Fellowship dissertation at Cambridge, Poussin has been a major preoccupation of his life. It is a measure of his eminence in this field that when in i960 the Louvre organized the largest exhibition of the artist's work which has ever been assembled, Blunt was invited to compile the catalogue.

The volumes under review are therefore the mature distillations of a mind which has devoted a lifetime to the study of the artist. The immediate occasion of their publication is the author's Mellon lectures given at Washington in 1958, but he has wisely taken the opportunity to annex to these a catalogue raisonné of all the artist's paintings and sculpture. In addition there is a volume of different format in which all the paintings which he accepts as authentic are reproduced on a legible scale together with a few copies and engravings of lost works.

This, therefore, is not only a highly scholarly study appropriate to one whom the poet Thompson described in The Castle of Indolence as 'learned Poussin', but is designed as the definitive work on the artist. There is no doubt that it achieves this aim. Subsequent scholars may discover new paintings, change the dating of a work here and there (though on this controversial subject Blunt has some very wise things to say), or reinterpret the meaning of an individual subject, but 'Blunt on Poussin' will certainly remain the standard work of reference on the artist for a long time to come.

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JULY 1968 NOTES ON BOOKS

The preface to the catalogue of the Poussin exhibition at the Louvre opened by describing the artist as 'the least popular of all the old masters, at any rate in France'. Paradoxical as this statement must seem in the face of the success of the exhibition and the 1,444 items included in Blunt's bibliography, more than half of which is devoted to writings of the last forty years (with a high proportion of them in French), there is an element of truth in the statement. Poussin is the most self-consciously intellectual of painters. He has long been described by his own countrymen as a ' peintre-philosophe'' . His appeal was deliberately directed to the rational faculties rather than to the senses. Popular in a wide sense he is very unlikely ever to become ; he is par excellence the art historian's painter. This does not, of course, mean that he was a merely pedantic painter, rather that he believed that an artist's painting, like his life, should be controlled by reason, his activities in both spheres planned and meaningful.

Blunt quotes a passage from one of Roger Fry's essays in which he discusses a Poussin in formal terms concluding with the phrase ť ... as far as I can discover the story of Achilles was merely a pretext for a purely plastic construction'. Nothing, as the author points out, would have made Poussin more indignant than such an analysis. Poussin was above everything concerned with the content of his paintings. Although there are passages in these volumes in which paintings are discussed in terms of form and colour (chiefly as a means of dating undocumented works), the main tenor of the lectures is iconographical. After an О vidian beginning, Stoicism is the theme which runs through most of Poussin's painting from about 1640 onwards, and by skilful quotations from the artist's own letters combined with extracts from Stoic philosophy and the writings of Poussin's contemporaries on the subject, Blunt is able to show that almost every painting is carefully thought out to embody some particular Stoic idea or group of ideas, and his figure painting becomes in consequence ever-increasingly austere. This applies even when the subject is a Christian one. The author brings a particularly impressive wealth of learning to bear on his exposition of the syncretic religious ideas prevalent in the circle of Poussin's friends in Rome and in Paris by which they attempted to reconcile Christianity with classical philosophy (hence Poussin's adoption of classical costumes and setting for the two series of Sacraments ). Even the heroic landscapes of Poussin's last years are convincingly interpreted in terms of the ideas of late Stoic writers like Cornutus and Macrobius, who turned the myths of Greece and Rome into allegories of the nature of the universe. Our understanding of these, for many his noblest works, gains greatly thereby.

It is rarely that one is left asking for more information from these volumes. A small point which puzzled the reviewer arises from the reproduction of a marginal drawing from a sale catalogue by Gabriel de Saint- Antoin showing a terracotta bust of Poussin's wife by Duquesnoy. It is not stated whether this is taken from the Mariette sale of 1775, but if so the bust is the one bought by Horace Walpole (letter to the Countess of Upper Ossory dated 20th December 1775). In this event a particularly interesting souvenir of the artist is probably still hidden in some English collection, for the bust reappeared at the Strawberry Hill Sale in 1842 (Sixteenth Day, lot 85). An even better drawing by J. Carter is in the Lewis Collection at Farmington and might help to trace it.

The wealth of material on Poussin contained in these volumes is enormous, and is marshalled with extraordinary skill. The only shortcoming of any significance found by the reviewer is the fact that the system of enumeration used in the volume of illustrations (which is chronologically arranged) is different from that adopted for the critical catalogue (classified by subjects). The text volume refers only to the plate numbers, and cross reference to the catalogue (very necessary for a careful reading) is not easy, for the subject index must first be consulted. This flaw perhaps arises from the fact that the volumes are the work of different publishers. The catalogue

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1 968 is admirably printed in Great Britain by the Phaidon Press. The two others were produced in America for the Bollingen Foundation and their bookwork is markedly inferior. Many of the plates are distinctly muddy and unworthy of the splendidly lucid text they illustrate. One at least (Plate 250) is so obscure as to be totally incomprehensible.

F. J. B. WATSON

EUGENE Delacroix's theory of art. By George P. Mras. Princeton , Princeton University Press y 1966. [Oxford University Press , 605 net]

Even a casual reading of Delacroix's Journal will reveal a wide range of references to earlier writers and commentators on the theory of art. They form a mixed bunch : Diderot and de Piles, Leonardo and Poussin, Bacon and Reynolds, Addison and Boileau. Delacroix was a compulsive writer - and a compulsive theorizer; he raided earlier texts for supporting evidence, just as he raided earlier paintings for technical hints and compositional devices. In his letters and his published articles, as well as in his Journal , he shows a deep concern with the meaning and interpretation of problems long familiar to his predecessors. The day after his election to the Institut in January 1857, he embarked upon a Dictionnaire des Beaux- Arts, which remained uncompleted at his death in 1863. But his drafts and jottings have now been threaded together by Professor Mras and reduced to a consideration of specific problems: Nature and Imitation, the Ideal and the Antique, Unity and Variety, Genius and Beauty, the Sublime and the Sketch.

Within these selected categories, Professor Mras aims to trace the pedigree of Delacroix's art theory. Thus, the text becomes a lexicon of source-detection; each idea is run to earth, whether in Roger de Piles, Leonardo or Diderot. Of course, Delacroix knew in varying degrees of intimacy the writings of these men; but it is pushing the pedantically obvious too far to trace a brief reference to the serpentine line back to Lomazzo and Hogarth, neither of whom Delacroix had read. This is perhaps one failing of Professor Mras's method. One must clearly distinguish between the obvious debt (an acknowledged borrowing or a paraphrase) and the coincidental relationship, apparent to the wide-ranging historian, but by no means necessarily so for Delacroix himself.

Equally, it is surely misleading to see Delacroix's theory of art as merely related to earlier practitioners. It is, of course, revealing to see the antecedents and sources of his ideas. But the fact that he often gives them an individual twist (as Professor Mras acknowledges) shows that he is by no means content to crib and paraphrase. However much he might dislike Balzac and Beethoven, Courbet and Ingres (and here again, his attitude to all four is curiously equivocal), Delacroix was a man of the nineteenth century. Any discussion of his theory of art should contain more than passing references to Stendhal, Goethe, Heine, Cousin, Quatremère de Quincy, Ingres and Baudelaire. If we see Delacroix merely as a synthesizer of past art theory, we fail to take stock of his own historical position. His re-phrasing of the past was only a part; what he added to it was equally, if not more significant. It was these more empirical observations which later interested Signac and others, rather than the apparatus of traditional art theory.

It was as the result of these more empirical observations (together with the experience of his own painting) that Delacroix's ideas changed and developed. He never presented a cut-and-dried system. This is apparent in his repeated allusions to the notion of the sketch. Delacroix's usage is not as consistent as Professor Mras would have us believe. Only on rare occasions does he refer to the simple division between sketch and finished picture. One needs to isolate the differences between étude , esquisse and ébauche. And Delacroix's preferences frequently waver between the advantages of the finished picture and those of the sketch.

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