When I see a work like this, I see movement,
I see dynamism and I see a lot of different skills at play in order to achieve that.
As a painter, he's incredibly sculptural.
And we see that in his drawings.
You know, these are drawings of a sculptor.
I think if we think about Poussin,
we think of him as the father of the French Classical School of painting.
He's been kind of cast in that role since the 17th century
as somebody who is very intellectual,
very rigorous,
his works are very austere, perhaps slightly cold. And
it's not that that's not true,
I think that's just a reputation that comes from the later years of his work.
Because actually, if we look at early Poussin, he's a bit wild and he's a bit naughty
and heís having fun with these very, kind of raucous and lively subjects.
Poussin is essentially this boy from Normandy who's gone to Paris for his artistic training
and he has become obsessed with the idea of getting to Rome.
And when he does, he, I think is just in seventh heaven.
He's out with his tape measure, looking at classical sculptures
measuring, you know, the height of an instep,
the length of a collarbone to try and work out how the ancients created these perfect sculptures.
So, it is this very, very intense, nerdy period of study.
He's probably having some kind of fun at the same time
because we know he gets syphilis around these years.
That is what it is. But
at the same time, you know, it's this period for him
where he's able to kind of throw himself into the classical world
and just immerse himself in the world of sculptures and antiquities.
There is, for Poussin, this incredible fluidity
moving between different media.
He's incredibly comfortable looking at sculpture,
translating that to a piece of paper.
But actually, I think that probably the best example
is that he starts making these wax figurines
So, it's almost as if he's giving himself this intermediary step
where he can model figures out of wax
and he can ñ they are only the size of his palm ñ
he can adjust their poses, he can rotate them,
he can draw them from every angle,
and then he can move that towards a painting.
But it's as if the painting ñ we only get to the two-dimensional painting ñ
having had this two- and three-dimensional exploration beforehand.
Two things are really important, once
you've got an armature, which is hugely important, that holds everything together.
So that's the skeleton. But then, by warming up the beeswax
it becomes soft and malleable, but it doesn't fracture, it holds together beautifully,
becomes incredibly compliant, you can push it around and twist it.
So at the moment, that's quite a stiff structure.
But if I were to heat this up, I can twist it and contort it into any position that I want it to.
This is a group from The Triumph of Pan and it sits on the true left-hand side.
The ram facing inwards, her leg leading inwards into the centre of the scene.
This group is wonderfully, wonderfully complex.
You have two satyrs, the woman and a goat.
And the interconnected flow, looping kind of structures of all these figures
is just brilliant,
made all the more difficult by having these complex drapes around this central figure.
But those drapes are amazing, because it lends so much more shape,
form, but also dynamism and movement, to her twisting structure.
If you wet the silk it responds to the moisture and just holds the form.
It's like there's a memory in the silk that just holds it.
I wait for it to dry and then, it holds that shape fantastically well.
I think Poussin could have experimented,
creating painting in advance really.
And then the fabric really accentuates the movement of the body
you've got a kind of pretty much spontaneous instant access to how the composition might look,
both in terms of colour, in terms of light, because the fabric holds the light so brilliantly.
Kind of paint in 3D, really.
Itís quite a fiddly task, really. But it does give you instant results.
So, the wonderful thing about Poussin working in this way, with these models,
is that it reminds me of an analogue version of what we do today on computer.
So, you can bring all these various components together
and various different players and different models can come together as a composition.
And then you can start to move the composition around, or flip it
from left to right,
see it in reverse,
and when you're done with it,
store it.
So, it's just, it's a genius way of playing very quickly with these ideas.
You know in the way that I work in terms of film, I work with a cinematographer,
an editor ñ so someone who's lighting, someone who's deciding what lenses to use,
someone who's helping me decide the shape and the colour of the costumes, how they drape.
Here, this is the artist doing it all in one, if you like,
and having to capture it in a single still.
In The Adoration of the Golden Calf, I can almost read it as a storyboard.
It's almost giving instructions of how you would shoot it
if you were to shoot it as a cinematic work, you know, from the cinematography of how you light it,
it almost gives you movement of what we need the audience to see first,
in terms of the action and then where we might either change frame or rack focus
or have a camera movement that might kind of
start in the corner towards Moses and then kind of pan out and sort of see the wider scene.
The kind of films that I'm interested in making recently are quite Hollywood-like, high production value.
And so, in that kind of film you often have a camera on a Steadicam,
or an arm which moves smoothly around a scene and sort of takes everything in
to make it feel big, to make it feel epic.
And I think, you know, for me,
this is what's happening in this painting in a different way,
through the way the lighting is,
through the way that the people are configured and the choreography.
It feels like movement.
For me, the challenge that captivates Poussin is how to capture movement in two dimensions.
So that's where, I think, this huge influence of and passion for The Borghese Dancers
it's his most beloved antiquity.
And I think the work in which we really get the greatest sense of his passion for that object
is the Dance to the Music of Time from the Wallace Collection,
which we are extraordinarily lucky to be borrowing for this exhibition.
It's his greatest dance picture,
and it's this picture in which we see those dancers from The Borghese Dancers,
but they've been removed from the bas-relief frieze and Poussin's made them into a round now.
So, it's this amazing circle of dancers, no beginning, no end, just perpetually whirling across the canvas.
Poussin is someone who has this very sincere, very heartfelt passion for antiquity
and this ñ this dance he's dancing ñ
this movement between sculpture and bas-relief and drawing and vase and model and painting.
You know, that complicated process he's working through.
That, to me, is in a way his love letter to antiquity.
You know, you arrive at these beautiful paintings, which are just filled with the classical world.
And I think that's him doing his very best to equal the ancients,
doing his best to last for perpetuity like they have.