Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665
NG 5597 
The Adoration of the Golden Calf

Humphrey Wine, 2001

Extracted from:
Humphrey Wine, The Seventeenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2001).

1633–4

Oil on canvas, 153.4 × 211.8 cm

Provenance

Painted, together with its pendant The Crossing of the Red Sea (Melbourne, National Gallery of New South Wales), with which it remained until 1945, for Amedeo dal Pozzo (1579–1644);¹ recorded in his running inventory of possessions at the Palazzo Dal Pozzo della Cisterna, Turin, of 1634–44² and in his posthumous inventory of 1644;³ recorded at the same location in inventories of 1668 and 1676;⁴ apparently sold for 3000 ducats by Giacomo Maurizio dal Pozzo to an unnamed painter acting on behalf of Louis XIV, presumably around 1680 since by October 1684 it was in the collection of Philippe, the Chevalier de Lorraine (1644–1702), in Paris;⁵ bought c. 1686–8 by the jeweller Pierre Le Tessier de Montarsy (1647–1710) and sold by him at this time with its pendant for 14,000 livres to the marquis de Seignelay (1651–90);⁶ acquired before 1698⁷ by Jean Neyret de la Ravoye, Trésorier Général de la Marine (d.1701), in whose posthumous inventory of August 1701 it is recorded on the ground floor of his Paris hôtel in the rue de La Perle and valued at 3000 livres;⁸ recorded in 1712 in the posthumous inventory of Jean‐Baptiste Le Ragois de Bretonvilliers, Seigneur de Saint Dié, Conseiller du Roi and Lieutenant Général du Gouvernement de Paris (d.1712), at the hôtel de Bretonvilliers, Ile St‐Louis, where NG 5597 and its pendant were valued at 3500 livres each;⁹ possibly inherited and sold by Benigne Le Ragois, marquis de Bretonvilliers (1690–1760), the nephew of Jean‐Baptiste, and Lieutenant Général du Gouvernement de Paris;¹⁰ bought in Paris in 1741 with its pendant by the dealer Samuel Paris for Sir Jacob de Bouverie (1694?–1761) of Longford Castle, near Salisbury (later the 1st Viscount Folkestone, whose son became the Earl of Radnor in 1765), for £481 5s. plus commission;¹¹ possibly temporarily removed to London for restoration(?) c. 1744,¹² but seen in the gallery at Longford Castle in 1776;¹³ by descent to the 7th Earl of Radnor (1895–1968);¹⁴ bought from him by the National Gallery in 1945 out of the Florence Fund with a contribution from the NACF .

Exhibitions

London 1873, RA , Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters (155); London 1903, RA , Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters (63); London 1932, RA , Exhibition of French Art 1200–1900 (143) (no. 123 of the Commemorative Catalogue of the same exhibition); London 1945–6, NG , Exhibition in Honour of Sir Robert Witt, C.B.E., D.LITT, F.S.A. of the principal acquisitions made for the Nation through the National Art Collections Fund (18); Paris 1960, Louvre, Nicolas Poussin (38).

Related Works

Paintings

The question of copies of NG 5597 is complicated by the fact that at least two other treatments of this subject by, or once attributed to, Poussin are known. One is the treatment known both through the engraving of J.B. de Poilly and through the painting in the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, the authenticity of which is questionable and which is regarded by some as a pastiche;¹⁵ another is the painting recorded by Félibien as having been painted for a Neapolitan patron, damaged in 1647, a fragment of which was recorded by Blunt in an English private collection.¹⁶ The posthumous inventory of Etienne Gantrel (d.1706) recorded ‘une autre copie du Veau d’or, moyenne’ valued at 60 livres, which may have been a copy after Poussin.¹⁷ A lost painting recorded in the van Biesum sale, Rotterdam, 1719, may, according to Rosenberg, have been the treatment of the theme providing the basis for the San Francisco work.¹⁸

The following are copies of NG 5597:

• (1) Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, no. 1931, 99 × 133 cm;¹⁹
• (2) Private collection, England, recorded in 1948. Probably a nineteenth‐century copy, to judge from the photograph in the NG dossier;
• (3) In reverse, a small oil sketch (11½ × 15½ in.) sold Christie’s, 14 January 1972 (lot 101, 80 guineas). Photograph in NG dossier;
• (4) Ader Picard Tajan, Paris, 30 June 1989 (lot 196), 56.5 × 71 cm (illustrated);
• (5) Moscow, Pushkin Museum, 114 × 167 cm; according to Réau, a copy dating to the beginning of the eighteenth century;²⁰
• (6) A copy said to be by Charles Lebrun was in the Robert Strange sale, Christie’s, 5 March 1773, lot 109;²¹
• (7) A variant treatment in a private collection, London, recorded in 1970;²²
• (8) A painting of NG 5597 by Pierre de Sève (1623–95) for the Gobelins tapestry works was made sometime between 1684 and 1691,²³ probably towards the beginning of this period when NG 5597 was owned by Philippe de Lorraine (see Provenance and note 5).

The following may be copies of NG 5597:

• (1) Lot 101 of the Dufresne sale, Amsterdam, 1770, the recorded size of which was 41 × 68 pouces (i.e. 111 × 184 cm);
• (2) Item 64 recorded in the posthumous inventory of J.‐B. Maximilien Titon on 12 August 1768;²⁴
• (3) The painting of the Adoration of the Golden Calf offered for sale by Aureliano Albano, chief secretary of Prince Carlo Emanuele of Savoy, to another of the prince’s secretaries in a letter of 17 December 1862 in which Aureliano claimed his painting to be by Poussin and to have been made for ‘il cardinale Del (sic) Pozzo’;²⁵
• (4) Lancret sale, Paris, Rémy, 5 April 1782, lot 332 included an ‘Adoration du Veaud’ or… genre de Poussin’, 154 × 122 cm (‘4 pieds 9 pouces de haut, sur 3 pieds 9 pouces de large’). Since this lot included a pendant of similar size of ‘Les Israëlites après le passage de la mer rouge’, it seems reasonable to suppose that the version of the first painting broadly corresponded, albeit in vertical format, to NG 5597. The sale comprised pictures belonging to Madame Lancret and others belonging to ‘M**’. It is unclear to whom lot 332 belonged;[page 315]
• (5) Dezallier d’Argenville included among works by Poussin then in Rome ‘le passage de la mer rouge, l’adoration du veau d’ or’ and among those by him in France in one of various unnamed collections ‘le veau d’or’;²⁶
• (6) A painting of the Golden Calf purporting to be by Poussin was exhibited at the Académie Royale de Toulouse in 1783.²⁷

A painting of Moses and Aaron holding the Tablets of the Law in which the figure of Aaron is based on that in NG 5597 is in the parish church of Harwich, Essex. It was acquired from William Paris in 1700.²⁸

Drawings

There is a study for a figure like the dancer at the centre of NG 5597 in a Brussels private collection ( R.‐P. 312v). It is on the verso of a sheet which includes a study for a Crossing of the Red Sea, not the picture in Melbourne but one projected in 1647 and not completed.²⁹ No original drawings preparatory for NG 5597 are known, but presumed copies of preparatory drawings for it exist: R.‐P. R672, R906 and R1088; R.‐P. R1105 is a copy of R.‐P. R906; R.‐P. R81 is a drawing of the whole composition with variants and is also possibly a copy of a compositional drawing by Poussin. All of these drawings include a dancing figure facing three‐quarters towards the viewer ducking under the upraised arms of two other dancers, a motif not used by Poussin in the final composition. There is nothing in any of these drawings to link them either to the painting in San Francisco or to the fragment once in an English private collection, and the motif of the dance, so central to NG 5597, appears in them all. Nevertheless, their status is too uncertain to suggest more than that a straightforward reversal of the dancing figure in A Bacchanalian Revel (NG 62; see pp. 288–95) was not Poussin’s initial choice. A highly finished drawing (48.5 × 64.5 cm, medium unknown) recorded in a Bolognese private collection in 1978 is after the painting and is not by Poussin.³⁰

For other drawings in eighteenth‐century sales which may be connected with NG 5597, see R.‐P ,. vol. 2, pp. 1154, 1161 and 1163.

Prints

• (1) By Etienne Baudet (1638–1711) (Andresen 68; Wildenstein 22) drawn by P. Monier. This print records the Chevalier de Lorraine’s ownership of NG 5597 in Paris, but states its size as 4ft 10in. × 5ft 8in. As Davies and Blunt pointed out, this last measurement is certainly a slip for 6 ft 8 in. With the measurement so revised it would correspond both with the proportions of Baudet’s print and with the size of NG 5597.³¹ Baudet presented an impression of his print to the Académie on 27 May 1684;³²
• (2) anon., published by J.F. Cars (d.1771) (Andresen 69);
• (3) anon., published by J. Audran (1667–1756) (Andresen 70);
• (4) anon., published by E. Gantrel (1646–1706) (Andresen 71), possibly an earlier state of Andresen 69;³³
• (5) by E. Gantrel and finished by L. de Surugue (1686–1762) (Andresen 72);
• (6) in reverse, anonymous in a Dutch Bible (Andresen 73);
• (7) in reverse, C.P.J. Normand (1765–1840) or possibly by his son, L.J. Normand. Plate XXIV of C.P. Landon’s Vie et Oeuvre Complète de Nicolas Poussin, Paris 1813.

Tapestry

(i) Gobelins c. 1700,³⁴ and (ii) Aubusson (?), eighteenth century, in reverse.³⁵

Technical Notes

NG 5597, which shows some wear throughout – but little in the important parts of the picture – and a small amount of blanching, was repaired and retouched in 1978 following serious malicious damage.³⁶ The most serious areas of paint loss were near the top of the bull’s head, the upper part of the face of the man in a tunic to the right of Aaron, and above and to the left of the woman at the extreme right. During the 1978 restoration the relining canvas, which had been applied at some date before the painting’s acquisition by the Gallery, was removed. There are also small losses at the extreme top right, along the right edge, other small scattered losses, and some diagonal losses just above and to the left of the head of the woman kneeling at the extreme centre right.

The canvas is a medium plain‐weave. The ground is a single layer of a grey‐ochre colour. Its composition – calcium carbonate, silica, a little iron oxide pigment, but virtually no lead white–is identical to that of the Gallery’s Finding of Moses (NG 6519) painted more than fifteen years later. The greyer parts of the sky consist of smalt mixed with white over a greyish‐brown underlayer; the bluer parts contain ultramarine. The foliage greens are based on lead‐tin yellow combined with green earth and yellow‐brown ochre. In the draperies the blue is ultramarine and white for the lights, with ultramarine glaze over a black underlayer for the darks; the bright yellow is lead‐tin yellow, and the more orange tones contain lead‐tin yellow with vermilion and fine red earth (Venetian red); the orange‐brown is Venetian red with lead white; the bright reds are vermilion with Venetian red; and the green is green earth with lead‐tin yellow, other earth pigments and white. The pigments in the flesh are vermilion with white, a copper green, yellow earth and black, and, in the browner flesh areas, Venetian red with white over a brown underlayer. Generally the flesh paints are multi‐layered. Media analysis by gas chromatography has shown the use of linseed oil.³⁷

There are pentimenti visible to the naked eye to the left of Aaron’s drapery and to the outline of the jowl of the golden ‘calf’. The X‐radiograph shows that the position of the thumb of the woman pointing at the right was adjusted downwards, and that the infant lying across its mother’s knees in the foreground may have been holding an object of some kind (fig. 1).

The magnificent frame (fig. 2), probably the finest in the Gallery’s collection, is early eighteenth‐century French and is the same pattern as that on the painting’s pendant now in Melbourne.³⁸ Possibly both frames were commissioned by Jean‐Baptiste Le Ragois de Bretonvilliers, who once owned the London and Melbourne paintings (see under Provenance), soon after his older brother’s death in 1709. It was at this time that he undertook a major redecoration of his Paris hôtel.³⁹

Discussion

The subject is from Exodus. Chapter 24 tells that Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Law from the Lord, leaving the children of Israel in the charge of Aaron and Hur. Chapter 32 relates that when the people thought that Moses would not return they asked Aaron to make them other gods. Aaron made a golden calf from the people’s earrings and set it upon an altar before which the Israelites made offerings. When Moses returned and saw the calf, and the people dancing, in his anger he broke the stone tablets on which the Lord had written his Commandments.

Moses is shown in the left background about to break one of the tablets (fig. 3). He is accompanied by Joshua. Aaron is shown centre right in white gesturing towards the golden ‘calf’, which in NG 5597 is evidently a bull. It seems likely, as Dempsey has suggested, that Poussin intended the bull to represent Apis, the bull‐god of Memphis, so showing the Israelites returning to Egyptian ritual, and that NG 5597 may be seen as an example of Poussin’s syncretising approach to pagan and Christian (sic) myth.⁴⁰ Philo of Alexandria, a French translation of whose works by Pierre Bellier was published in Paris in 1612, relates both that the Israelites returned to the practices of the Egyptians and that they forged a god in the shape of a bull.⁴¹

The position of Moses and Joshua in relation to the picture as a whole, and the figures in the foreground and middle ground to the right of Aaron, appear to derive from the depiction of the same episode by Raphael and his studio in the Vatican Loggie (fig. 4),⁴² and, as in the Vatican fresco, Poussin’s Moses looks towards Joshua, his successor. However, as Bätschmann has pointed out, the idea for the overall composition was taken by Poussin from one of the illustrations in Gabriele Simeoni’s Figure de la Biblia illustrate de stanze Tuscane published in Lyon in 1564 (fig. 5),⁴³ a source which he seems to have used only rarely.⁴⁴ In both this and NG 5597 there is a group of clothed dancers at the left, a group of kneeling figures at the right and tents in the right background. There are differences, however: Poussin has his figures dance around the Golden Calf rather than to one side, and has replaced the column supporting the idol in Simeoni’s illustration with a plinth; and unlike Simeoni, who shows Aaron as a passive [page 319] spectator in the background, Poussin has made Aaron more prominent and, with the altar, the pivot around which the dancers rotate and the Israelites worship, so underlining the High Priest’s responsibility in the affair.⁴⁵ The inclusion of dancing figures as a motif, besides following the Simeoni engraving, is consistent with the Bible, since it was when Moses saw both the calf and the dancing that he broke the tablets of stone (Exodus 32:19). Poussin does not, however, show the Israelites naked as is related in Exodus 32: 25. Poussin’s group of dancing figures, as has often been noted,⁴⁶ is a reversal of that in NG 62.⁴⁷

It has been assumed – on the basis of common provenance, size, chromatic values and related subject matter – that NG 5597 is a pair with the Melbourne Crossing of the Red Sea (fig. 6), although their compositions are not such as to class them as left/right pendants. As has recently become evident, however, Pietro da Cortona’s Gathering of the Manna (fig. 7) and Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s Construction of the Tabernacle (fig. 8) were both recorded in Amedeo dal Pozzo’s running inventory of 1634–44 as being of the same size as the [page 320] two paintings by Poussin, and both have likely dates of 1635, suggesting that the four pictures were acquired by Amedeo for the Palazzo Dal Pozzo della Cisterna as a cycle of Mosaic subjects.⁴⁸ Although this may be the case, the figures in the Cortona and the Romanelli paintings are, broadly speaking, closer to the picture plane and hence larger than those in the two Poussins. Furthermore, whereas both the Cortona and Romanelli share a common theme – the making of offerings to the Lord – the Poussin paintings, the themes of which are respectively salvation and idolatry, do not. This suggests that Poussin was not particularly constrained in his choice of subjects, or in his manner of treating them.

Conceptually, NG 5597 and the Melbourne picture belong to a group of paintings of Old Testament subjects datable to between 1631 and 1638, such as The Plague at Ashdod (Paris, Louvre), The Triumph of David (London, Dulwich Picture Gallery) and the Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem (Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum), in which Poussin showed a dramatic scene rather than a single dramatic moment. Both NG 5597 and its pair were generally regarded as dating to c. 1635–7.⁴⁹ Then, in 1985, an article publishing an Amedeo dal Pozzo inventory supposedly of 1634, which included NG 5597, apparently provided a final date for the work.⁵⁰ However, it was subsequently established that the inventory in question was a running inventory which started in 1634 and continued for a decade,⁵¹ so that the dating of NG 5597 had to derive from comparison with other datable works, in particular a group of coppery‐toned works of which one, The Saving of the Infant Pyrrhus (Paris, Louvre), is now known to have entered the collection of Gian Maria Roscioli (1604–44) by September 1634.⁵² Consequently, a date of c. 1634 seemed reasonable for both the London and the Melbourne paintings, which were referred to consecutively in Amedeo dal Pozzo’s running inventory, and so presumably were completed within months of each other.⁵³ Recently, however, new documents have emerged which suggest that this date should be advanced. Firstly, it is now clear that by August 1631 Amedeo was writing to his cousin – Poussin’s patron Cassiano – with a view to acquiring major paintings for his palazzo, albeit not necessarily the Mosaic cycle of which NG 5597 was part.⁵⁴ Secondly, it now seems very likely that in July 1632 Poussin received via Cassiano dal Pozzo a relatively modest payment of 50 ducatone on account of his two paintings for Amedeo.⁵⁵ This payment was most likely made when the London and Melbourne paintings were commissioned. Bearing in mind their size and complexity, they were probably not finished until well into 1633 at the earliest, and work on them may have continued into 1634. In any case they seem likely to have been completed before The Saving of the Infant Pyrrhus, which was delivered in the autumn of 1634, but after the Dresden Adoration of the Magi, which bears the date 1633 but does not have the same intense coppery colouring as NG 5597.⁵⁶ The date of 1633–4 for NG 5597 would be consistent with a drawing at Windsor by G.B. Castiglione (RL 4054; fig. 9) which has long been recognised as in part derived from it.⁵⁷ Castiglione is not recorded as having visited Turin so he must have seen NG 5597 in Rome. Castiglione [page 321]was in Rome by 1632 but had left for Naples by the end of March 1635, probably not returning before 1636.⁵⁸ A date between 1633 and 1634⁵⁹ for NG 5597 would also be consistent with the date of c. 1634 suggested for preliminary drawings in the Louvre related to The Crossing of the Red Sea,⁶⁰ albeit that the proposed dating of the Louvre drawing was itself in part influenced by the mistaken belief that the Dal Pozzo inventory referred to above was dated 1634, rather than a running inventory of 1634–44.

General References

Graham 1820, Old Testament no. 22; Smith 1837, 33; Grautoff 1914, 88; Magne 1914, 124, 125;⁶¹ Davies 1956, pp. 177–9; Blunt 1966, 26; Thuillier 1974, 83; Wild 1980, 64; Wright 1985a, 86; Wright 1985b, p. 135; Mérot 1990, 21; Thuillier 1994, 100 (where wrongly stated to be the pendant to The Saving of the Infant Pyrrhus in the Louvre).

Notes