Improbable

I wake up- and when I glance at the digital clock I find- more often than seems statistically probable- that it's one of those times when all the numbers are the same number- the most impressive of which is 22:22. Last night- or rather, this morning- I caught it saying 4:44.

The real world feels increasingly dreamlike, the dream world feels increasingly real.

Various Things In Brief

The weather system that has been hurting the USA has moved into our neighbourhood. Ailz says it has ridden here on the Gulf Stream. It's belabouring us in the form of icy rain, which occasionally hardens into sleet or hail. I understand it may not move on until the New Year.

Climate Change I believe in. Whether that change will take the form of global warming I doubt.

I keep having to remind myself that I'm no longer responsible for my mother's well-being.

A few posts back I said that Manet's Bar At the Folies Bergere might be the greatest painting on view in England. Other contenders would be Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding in the National Gallery, Botticelli's Mystical Nativity in the National Gallery, Picasso's Three Dancers in the Tate and Poussin's Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake in the National Gallery (again). What all these great paintings have in common is an element of mystery. What are the Arnolfinis actually up to? What existing story is Poussin illustrating or is it something he has imagined for himself? Great art always holds something back and invites us to wonder what it might be...

Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time in the Wallace Collection should also be on the short list- but it would be unfair to allow him more than one entry- even if he is the greatest painter who ever lived...

No Rembrandt? I think not. The greatest Rembrandts are elsewhere, though the magisterial self portrait in Kenwood House might just scrape into consideration...

No Breughel either- for much the same reason....

Notes On Poussin

I adore Caravaggio, but Poussin loathed him and said he'd "destroyed painting". Where we see magic and mystery in Caravaggio's pioneering use of chiarascuro Poussin saw cheap theatrics and corners being cut. Both views have validity.

Caravaggio was a very great artist. Poussin was even greater.

His classical romps- intended for the delectation of cardinals- are among the sexiest paintings ever.

As a young man he nearly died of syphilis. That learned him.

He had a problem painting eyes. There's something a bit screwy about the pictures in which the faces matter. Unsurprisingly he eschewed portraiture, though his self portraits- produced because a friend asked him to- aren't at all bad.

In old age he got the shakes. It shows up in the later paintings but never affects their numinosity.

I couldn't see the point of him when I was young, I thought him academic and frigid. I was very wrong.

He worked slowly- and didn't run a workshop. You commissioned a picture from him and what you got was all his own work. This was very modern of him.

He probably thought of himself as a good Christian but his pictures on Christian themes (as I wrote a few posts back) are dutiful rather than heartfelt. He's at his best with mythologies and landscape because then he didn't have the Pope breathing over his shoulder.

He's never showy. Put him in a gallery with Rubens and it's Rubens that makes you go "Wow!" But you can tire of Rubens, and of Poussin, never. He invites contemplation. Once he hooks you in, you stay hooked.

One of his greatest paintings is the landscape in the Getty which doesn't seem to be about anything- just a nice view with people and animals and a calm lake and a distant bonfire- but is actually about everything.