Poussin’s thumbprint

Mounted pin-brooch, 2007 aterials: 20ct gold, moonstone, engraved black mother-of-pearl (recycled), silver, 18ct white gold pin

dia eter: 44mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 424.MP-B.07 hidden alche y: 218-9

Of all the many and major treasures to be found in the Wallace Collection, the eternal hypnotic revolutions of Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time [P108] remains my earliest and perhaps most abiding wonder. Like other works depicting the primeval round-dance (and there is also the delightful circular dance of amoretti to be seen in a Xanto maiolica plate [C46]), it holds a particular fascination. I have written elsewhere about this, particularly in respect of my Aristophanes Candle-piece (294.CP.97)* which, in part, drew inspiration from this seminal painting. The canvas’s most illustrious son, however, undoubtedly remains a literary one: the great Proustian cycle of novels written by Anthony Powell, which honour their source of departure by reprising the painting’s title.

The theme of Time itself, in all its consequences, is central to this painting, as it has been to so much of my own work over the years but, in this final jewel in my Notebook of Pins, I have tried to feature a further, and for Poussin, an almost certainly unintentional symbol of fugitive Time – his own thumbprint: for the particularly vibrant surface treatment, which so illuminates his daring colourjuxtapositions, has been created by a determined and methodical ‘tooling’, or texturing, of the soft ground using – forensic examination has now established – the ‘pad’ of his left thumb. This treatment is unique amongst Poussin’s work and for me is peculiarly, even movingly, appropriate to the ‘temporal’ intentions of this great work.

Taking as a framing device the barely discernable zodiacal ring, Leo ascendant, in which Apollo appears, I have added, within its encompassing chapter, two of Poussin’s intended symbols of passing Time, his ‘supporting’ putti lower left and lower right, but here focusing solely on their attributes: on the left, the hand, pipe and soap bubbles (disappearing through the picture-plane) and on the right, the hand of the child bearing the hour-glass. Behind the upper centre I have engraved Poussin’s included but a-schematic symbol: the print left by the passing of his own left thumb.

* Hidden Alchemy 281