A Dance to the Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time

Artist	Nicolas Poussin
Year	1634-1635
Type	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	82.5 cm × 104 cm (32.5 in × 41 in)
Location	Wallace Collection, London

A Dance to the Music of Time is a painting by Nicolas Poussin in the Wallace Collection in London. It was painted between 1634 and 1636 as a commission for Giulio Rospigliosi (later Pope Clement IX), who according to Gian Pietro Bellori dictated its detailed iconography. It is best known for giving its name to the novel cycle of the same name, though this title is first seen in a Wallace Collection catalogue of 1913, before which it was given more prosaic titles referring to the Four Seasons. In the 1845 sale it was called La Danse des Saisons, ou l'Image de la vie humaine. It passed from the Rospigliosi family to the Fesch collection in 1806, when it was taken to France for a period, and was bought along with several other paintings by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford in the great Fesch sale in Rome in 1845, passing to his son Sir Richard Wallace.

Description

Four figures holding each other by the hand dance in a circle, as Time plays a lyre on the right. The scene is set in the early morning, with Aurora, goddess of dawn, preceding the chariot of Apollo the sun-god in the sky behind; the Hours accompany him and he holds a ring representing the Zodiac. According to Bellori, in Rospigliosi's scheme the four dancers were, beginning with the one at the back seen mostly from behind: Poverty, Labour, Riches, and Pleasure or Luxury. These represent a progression in human life, completed by Pleasure or Luxury leading to Poverty again. As the Four Seasons Poverty would be Autumn, Labour Winter, and so on. The suggestion of Anthony Blunt that, unusually for a group of the seasons, Autumn/Poverty at the rear of the group was male is now generally accepted, and the museum now describe him as Bacchus. This follows the story invented by Boitet de Frauville in his Les Dionysiaques that, responding to complaints from the Seasons and Time, Jupiter gave the world Bacchus and his wine to help them.

There are several pentimenti, including the removal of a second, larger, tree on the right between Winter/Labour and Time. The painting is in generally good condition, but has been retouched in places, including over the repair of a large L-shaped tear running right through the central group.

Anthony Powell

At the start of Anthony Powell's series of novels named after the painting the narrator, Nicolas Jenkins, reflects on it in the first two pages of A Question of Upbringing:

These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

Sources

• Wallace Live - catalogue entry
• Ingamells, John, The Wallace Collection, Catalogue of Pictures, Vol III, French before 1815, Wallace Collection, 1989, ISBN 0-900785-35-7