Two European Refugees in Melbourne

Dr Ursula Hoff AO OBE (1909–2005) was one of Australia’s most distinguished art historians and was, successively, a curator and associate director of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). She also taught in the University of Melbourne. After her retirement from the gallery, she served as adviser to the Felton Bequest based in London, and thus continued to enrich the range of art, particularly European art, locally accessible to the Australian public. The improvements on that front between 1939, when Hoff came to Australia as part of the diaspora of refugees from Nazified Europe, and her death in 2005, are immense; and in many, she was directly involved.

Perhaps the most spectacular and important of these achievements was the NGV’s acquisition in 1948 of one of Nicolas Poussin’s masterworks, The Crossing of the Red Sea, since exhibited in the gallery’s main collection. It is the pendant to Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf, now in the National Gallery Collection at London and acquired by it in 1945. Australia thus enjoys a single masterpiece, painted at Rome in about 1634–37, from the hand of one of the supreme painters. Since 1948, of course, with the growth of global travel and communications and the advent of “blockbuster” loan exhibitions, we have become more accustomed to access to works of such significance. Indeed, even some others of the comparatively rare and thus highly valuable works of Poussin have since been exhibited in Australia. Yet we have never had a major exhibition devoted solely to Poussin; and given our geographical situation, it may be a long time before we do. All the more then ought we to be grateful for that one which we do have.

Dr Ursula Hoff’s other great contribution was in building up the NGV’s collection of European prints and drawings. Her papers have been lodged with the University of Melbourne, and they provide a fascinating insight into the encounter with Australia and its people of this scholarly refugee from Nazism.

Awareness in this country of the significance of the works of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) has markedly increased with the growing “globalisation” of culture in general and the advent of computer-screen “virtual art galleries” in colour (which of course, are no substitute for seeing the works themselves). That growing awareness has in recent years received major fillips, by way of the publication in 1995 by Australian academic Dr John Carroll of his book Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture, and three insightful articles in Quadrant by Dr Carroll on Poussin and the significance of his paintings (the issues of June 1994, March 1996 and July-August 1997).

Carroll’s writings are revelatory indeed. They build on an established tradition interpreting Poussin as a “peintre-philosophe”, but they take the analysis to a new and important contemporary level. At this stage in the history of the West, and particularly in its art history, we have grown a little tired of the standard modernist view of Poussin as the dreary archetype of the “academic” or “classical” French school of painting. Thus, various commentators on Poussin emerging in the decades from 1960 have provided a much-needed antidote to that narrow, partial and ideological (not to say “politically correct”) approach. In addition, there have in recent years been some remarkable exhibitions of Poussin’s works in Europe and, in 2008, the major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York entitled Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions.

It was unfortunate for Poussin scholarship and for wider appreciation of his significance by informed people, that one of the major twentieth-century experts on Poussin was the late (and formerly Sir) Anthony Blunt (1907–83), Director of London’s Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, who in 1979 was unmasked by the British government for his espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. However, London had another great expert in the person of the redoubtable scholar of the Italian Seicento Sir Denis Mahon CH (born in 1910), who in his book Poussiniana (1962) famously challenged many of Blunt’s views on Poussin’s oeuvre. Mahon’s dogged campaign was one of the best stories of the art-historical world in the last half of the twentieth century. Mahon emerged victorious and as a more rounded and urbane personality than Blunt, whose views now seem as more than somewhat influenced by ideology.

Dr Ursula Hoff: Scholar and Connoisseur

However, let us turn first to Dr Ursula Hoff and her remarkable career, spanning Europe and Australia and most of the twentieth century. Not only did she bring to Australia her enormous learning and familiarity with the master artists of Europe, old and new; she also became the teacher and inspirer of several generations of art scholars and historians in this country. Her contribution to the general level of cultural awareness in Australia became great indeed. It was hard to be even moderately familiar with matters artistic and art-historical in postwar Australia and not be aware of Ursula Hoff as a scholarly and presiding spirit at the NGV; and indeed later, in her more advanced years, as being in herself a kind of “national treasure”—and to a much greater extent than is often the case when that description is applied.

In an obituary tribute to Dr Ursula Hoff published in the National Gallery of Australia’s journal Artonview in 2005, Irena Zdanowicz, former Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the NGV, encapsulated Hoff’s biography as follows:

Ursula Hoff was born in London, but grew up and was educated in Germany where she studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Cologne and Munich. She completed her doctorate on Rembrandt in Hamburg … supervised by Erwin Panofsky. In 1933 with the rise of Hitler the Hoff family fled to London where Ursula continued her studies and research, chiefly at the Courtauld and the Warburg Institutes. Despite having both German and British citizenship, she was unable to find permanent employment in Britain and therefore in 1939 she emigrated to Australia to take up the position of Secretary at the University Women’s College at the University of Melbourne. Her formal association with the National Gallery of Victoria dates from 1943 when [later Sir] Daryl Lindsay, then in the second year of his Directorship, appointed her Assistant Keeper of Prints, the Gallery’s sole curatorial position at that time. By the time of her retirement from the staff in 1973 she was Assistant Director and soon afterwards, in an unprecedented move, she was appointed to the Council of Trustees. In 1975 she moved to London to work as the Advisor to the Felton Bequest’s Committee, a position she held until 1984, after which she decided to return to Melbourne.

Zdanowicz also makes the important point that Dr Hoff “was the first professionally trained art historian to have been employed as a curator in Australia”. Surprisingly now, that was as late as in 1943.

We also learn from the outline accompanying the deposit of Dr Hoff’s papers at the University of Melbourne, that there was a wider and significant background to her appointment. “Dr Hoff was half-Jewish” and it appears that J.S. McDonald, the Director of the NGV immediately preceding Daryl Lindsay, “refused employment for German Jewish refugees in his Museum”. McDonald was a rather narrow and reactionary character, but his attitude towards the employment of refugees was of a piece with those of many (and perhaps even most) Australians at that time.

Many refugees, including highly qualified professionals, found it hard to gain employment in their fields; and this was due not just to the economic situation of the late 1930s, but also in large part to the attitudes of Australian professional bodies. Two refugees from Hitler’s Germany, Dr Meyer (a medico) and Dr Kahn (a barrister) brought test cases to the High Court of Australia seeking entry to the medical and legal professions respectively. Kahn’s case did not succeed; but it seems both men ultimately gained professional admission in their fields. In Dr Kahn’s case, the point taken against him was the oath of allegiance requirement; yet he was admitted as a barrister in England. Justice Evatt suggested that in denying him, Victoria was “plus royaliste que le roi”. In Dr Hoff’s case, even her British citizenship was not good enough for J.S. McDonald, who was apparently a Germanophobe as well as being anti-Semitic. It is a tribute to Sir Daryl Lindsay’s magnanimity that he employed her; and his judgment and foresight gained much for the NGV and art in Australia.

Zdanowicz notes that this led to great dividends at a needful time in the development of the arts in Australia:

[Hoff’s] role as an educator, at the NGV and the [Melbourne] University, in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s when both the academic study of art history and the curatorial profession were rapidly developing, meant that her influence over several generations of students was crucial and widespread. She set the highest, most intelligent standards in museum research, publications, exhibitions and collection development … in doing so she, more than any other individual, raised the status of the curatorial profession in Australia. Her attitude was marked by the true scholar’s independence and openness of mind, coupled with careful and astute judgement … She was responsible for many notable acquisitions in the field of drawings, prints and paintings, the most important of which is, arguably, the Barlow collection of Durer prints—an outstanding and virtually complete set of engravings and woodcuts by the Renaissance master.

She later took a major role in advising on many acquisitions for the (then) Australian National Gallery (now the NGA) established in 1968. In addition, her major publications included the impressive Catalogue of European Paintings before 1800 (1961) and “Paintings of the Early Netherlandish School” in the NGV Collection, Masterpieces of the NGV (1949), Charles I: Patron of Artists (1942), and books on the artists Charles Conder and Arthur Boyd.

However, let us focus on Dr Hoff’s role in the acquisition by the NGV of its Poussin. It is perhaps not going too far to suggest that the strategic alignment of certain factors—Dr Hoff’s presence at the NGV, her European background including her London origins, her training under Panofsky and her previous connections with the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes—all coalesced to assist in the acquisition of The Crossing of the Red Sea. It is clear, both from John Poynter’s detailed book Mr Felton’s Bequests (2003) and what Dr Hoff herself wrote on the history of the Felton Bequest, that the Melbourne Poussin “was acquired for the Felton Bequest … on the [joint] advice of A.J.L. McDonnell and Sir Kenneth Clark”.

Connoisseur and soldier, McDonnell was the son of Dr Aeneas McDonnell, the Toowoomba medico who helped Sister Kenny develop her treatments for polio victims. He was educated at Cranbrook School in Sydney and was a partner with John Young in the Macquarie Gallery. He served in the AIF in the Middle East from 1940 to 1943 and was a colonel in the “Control Commission for Germany 1945–46, the authority responsible for the recovery of works of art removed by the Germans”, work for which “he was honoured by the French Government by appointment as Officer of the Legion of Honour”. Hoff duly and modestly attributes the Poussin purchase to McDonnell and Clark; and of course as the NGV’s Director Sir Daryl Lindsay was also closely involved. However, given her background and professional training under Panofsky, Hoff’s input must have been very significant.

Poynter records the event as follows:

In a spectacular start to 1948, McDonnell recommended and the [Felton Bequest] Committee approved, for £14,000, Nicolas Poussin’s grand The Crossing of the Red Sea … Anthony Blunt thought it ‘not only madness, but wickedness … to separate the pair’.

Poynter adds that “in 1981, the Paul Getty Museum joined with the Norton Simon Foundation to purchase Poussin’s Virgin and Child with St John and Angels for £1,650,000; in 1948 the Felton Bequest had paid £14,000 for the same artist’s The Crossing of the Red Sea”. In 1983, Dr Hoff gave the purchase cost figure as “£17,500 sterling”. Whether the difference lay between Australian and sterling exchange rates, or was taken up in shipping costs and the like, matters but little now. The picture was a coup of the first order for the NGV; as Sir Daryl Lindsay and Dr Hoff well understood. In addition to her post as to Prints and Drawings, Dr Hoff was in charge of research and publications at the NGV; and it is notable that in many of her subsequent publications, the Crossing featured prominently. For instance, she gave it first position as the opening illustration for her 1983 survey of the history of the Felton Bequest. Her entry for the Poussin in her 1961 Catalogue of the NGV’s European Paintings before 1800 is detailed and exemplary in style and substance. It noted various dating issues and also that the later works of Poussin’s “second Roman period achieved a new grandeur and classical severity”.

One also sees the hand of Sir Kenneth Clark at work. It is notable that in January 1949, soon after the NGV obtained Poussin’s Crossing, and after the National Gallery in London had acquired the other of the Radnor pair of pictures, The Adoration of the Golden Calf, Clark visited Australia and specifically the NGV. He gave a lecture relating the NGV’s collection, including the Crossing, to “the other great collections of the world”. He later repeated his thoughts in his essay, “The Idea of a Great Gallery”, contributed to In Honour of Daryl Lindsay: Essays and Studies (1964):

 Even more difficult is the case of your Poussin, which is certainly one of the greatest pictures in the Gallery [NGV] but hardly tells as such in its present isolation. For the world of Poussin’s imagination, polished by long contemplation of the antique, is extremely remote from direct imitation of appearances, and I quite understand that anyone coming straight from the brightly-coloured realism of the late nineteenth century must find it painfully artificial and not a little dull; just as anyone who, being used to realistic movies, wandered into a play by Corneille or Racine. Such a picture will never be understood until we can surround it with work in the same imaginative mood.

Nowadays, with the growth of the NGV collection, there is much more such context for the Crossing. One can also detect in Clark’s comments, perhaps, the germ of his approach in Civilisation. Indeed, one of the best lines in Poynter’s book is where he reports J.S. McDonald’s rhetorical question in a speech titled “After Us the Deluge”: “What has Sir Kenneth Clark ever said to advance the cause of art?”!

Poynter notes that, for many years, the Felton Bequest had sought a good Poussin as part of the quest to build the NGV’s European collection. In 1919, the gallery’s London adviser Frank Rinder “had ‘a reasonable hope’ of obtaining a landscape by Poussin”. Later, Poussin was one of the quarries sought by Sir Daryl Lindsay in his important strategy for building up the NGV European collection through the Felton Bequest. It is also worth remarking in the context of Dr Hoff’s input in the period 1945 to 1948, that despite the earlier troubles of the Felton Bequest, in the period 1945 to 1957 “there was unusual harmony between the Trustees, the Bequests’ Committee, the London advisers and the staff of the Gallery. ‘Everything seemed to be moving smoothly towards the desired end of obtaining the best that was available for the collections.’”

Undoubtedly, Sir Daryl Lindsay had a large role in the acquisition of the Crossing, but it seems likely that Dr Hoff had an at least equal role. In his preface to National Gallery of Victoria: Painting Drawing Sculpture (1968), the then Director of the gallery, Eric Westbrook, who had arrived to succeed Sir Daryl Lindsay in 1956, paid this handsome tribute to Dr Ursula Hoff: “she has set standards of scholarship and sensibility in the visual arts which have affected every public gallery in this country”.

Poussin and the Western Tradition 

Poussin’s major works are today widely dispersed among the world’s galleries, the largest single concentration in numbers and quality being in the Louvre in Paris. Others are at the National Gallery in London, in the Prado at Madrid, and there are many smaller holdings elsewhere. Alain Merot’s 1990 monograph gives a full list of locations. Carroll has commented on the Melbourne picture, which also travelled to the Louvre on the occasion of the 1960 exhibition to hang alongside The Adoration of the Golden Calf.

Australian readers may find all this something of a revelation and perhaps an inspiration to seek out and to consider Poussin’s works more carefully when visiting the Louvre and other galleries overseas. Often, travellers (and not only first-timers) overlook Poussin’s achievement amidst the cornucopia of more obvious, familiar and accessible works in the major European galleries. Particular biases embedded in much of modern art history also contribute to the lack of wider appreciation for Poussin; but not for nothing has his work been described as the “Latin of painting”.

Poussin scholarship was strongly augmented in the last century. In the passage quoted earlier, Lord Clark was referring to Felibien’s earlier judgment on the significance of Poussin in the Western tradition. Especially since 1914, there has been a remarkable succession of major studies on Poussin’s life and works. One strong impetus was the Louvre exhibition in 1960 and the ensuing controversy in which Sir Denis Mahon challenged many conclusions published by Anthony Blunt. Poussin scholarship takes us back to the world of Winckelmann with his History of Ancient Art, connecting modern scholars and admirers of Poussin’s art to that world and to the epoch which preceded it, when Poussin was still working in Rome.

Last century’s foremost iconographer, the great Erwin Panofsky, Ursula Hoff’s main teacher at the University of Hamburg, wrote his seminal essay Et In Arcadia Ego: On the Conception of Transience in the Works of Poussin and Watteau in 1936 and revised it in 1955. It inspired many writers on Poussin’s work, as well as proving a source of enjoyment and reflection for readers who have taken the trouble to seek it out and to read it with the careful attention it deserves.

The Crossing of the Red Sea

Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea is an immediately impressive work. It presently hangs in the main gallery for European Art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the National Gallery of Victoria. Once, when the NGV’s European collection was smaller, it had a more central and prominent placing, but it still looks well and in context, where it now hangs, along with works of a similar epoch, notably Rigaud’s Monsieur le Bret and his son Cardin le Bret (1697). Readers of Todd Olsen’s book Poussin and France (2002) will find that picture very appropriate indeed to be hanging opposite the Poussin, as it depicts two of the “robins”, one red-robed and the other his black-robed son, both members of the emergent French “noblesse de robe” who were such an important group in the France of Poussin’s time.

For a full appreciation of the significance of The Crossing of the Red Sea, one needs to place it in the context of a number of major cycles or groups of works within Poussin’s oeuvre, particularly his pictures of scenes from the Old Testament including others from Exodus (such as Moses Striking Water from the Rock, 1637), and also in the wider context of his classical or mythological scenes and his two great Christian cycles of the Seven Sacraments. There is also the important context and contrast of its pendant The Adoration of the Golden Calf.

In her NGV book, Dr Hoff described The Crossing of the Red Sea thus:

In Exodus Chapters XIII and XIV, it is related how the Israelites were led by Moses out of captivity in Egypt and crossed the Red Sea dry-shod: ‘and the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud and by night in a pillar of fire.’ They were pursued by Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, with his horsemen and chariots. After the Israelites had crossed, Moses, at the command of the Lord, stretched out his hand over the sea and the waves returned and covered the pursuing Egyptians. This is the moment that Poussin has chosen; the Israelites are safely on the land; the Egyptians have perished. Foreground figures are salvaging armour and giving thanks; in the middle distance flight has turned to astonishment and thanksgiving; in the far distance on the hillside Miriam leads the women ‘with timbrels and with dances’ in a song of praise.

In his paper on the Melbourne Crossing, Franz Phillip points to the importance of how Poussin achieved “a balance of flight and thanksgiving … rather than [stressing] the ‘action’ of the miracle itself”. Christopher Wright notes: “the movements of the figures in this composition [the Edinburgh Moses] are very close to the Melbourne Crossing of the Red Sea and the picture is likely to have been painted at the same time”.

Our picture, along with The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1637?), was painted for Amadeo del Pozzo, the “cousin of Cassiano del Pozzo, a noted collector of antiquities in Rome, who had employed Poussin to make drawings from ancient monuments”. The painting was “first recorded in the collection of Amadeo del Pozzo, the Marchese di Voghera”. Wright notes that the Crossing was “not separated from its pendant until 1945” and laments their separation as “particularly unfortunate, as they are rare examples of Poussin’s concern with the way pictures had to relate to one another when they were conceived as a series or a pair”. We learn from the 1960 Louvre exhibition catalogue that the two pictures were in the Voghera Palace at Turin in 1664 and then with Philippe, Chevalier de Lorraine, by 1684. About 1713, they were in the Hotel de Bretonvilliers and in 1741 were bought at Paris by the merchant Samuel Paris and taken to England, where they were acquired by Sir Jacob Bouverie, 1st Viscount Folkestone, and then passed by descent to the Earls of Radnor. They were with Agnews in 1945. The National Gallery in London bought the Adoration in 1945 and the NGV then purchased its picture in early 1948.

The NGV’s official description of the work is briefly stated as follows: “Nicolas POUSSIN, French/Italian, The Crossing of the Red Sea (c.1634), oil on canvas, 155.6 x 215.3 cm, Felton Bequest, 1948, 1843-4”. The Melbourne picture is slightly smaller than The Ador-ation of the Golden Calf, but the overall dimensions make them close enough to an exact pair. Sir Denis Mahon also considers that the Adoration precedes the Crossing in date by about a year, and that these works were painted in about 1637–38.

It is a picture rather packed with human figures, even considered alongside others by Poussin, such as the Plague of Ashdod, for one example. It is quite luminous in its colour and light towards the lower left, whilst the upper right-hand quarter is dominated by the dark, indeed, virtually black, large cloud from which (or perhaps with which) there appears a rust-red column of light (or fire) at the far right-hand side of the canvas, representing the presence and the workings of the Deity, in thus parting the Red Sea. This aspect of the picture is often commented upon; and as Dr Hoff noted, it is one of those features in Poussin’s pictures which do not usually show up as visible in even good colour reproductions, but it is very clear when one views the work itself.

Franz Phillip contributed a detailed study entitled “Poussin’s Crossing of the Red Sea” to the scholarly collection In Honour of Daryl Lindsay: Essays and Studies (1964) and anyone researching the picture will find it the most useful place to start. Phillip explores the background to the picture by reference to earlier drawings and other inspirational sources, including “the flight motif … [and] … that classical formulation of the ‘Crossing’, its depiction by the Raphael School in the Vatican Loggie”. He draws particular attention to the evident three planes or “parallel friezes in fore-, middle- and background”, in which the respective groups of figures are set, being thus reminiscent of classical antique forms. Phillip also noted the differences of opinion amongst the Poussin experts as to the dating of the Melbourne picture, and concluded: “It is therefore quite feasible that the ‘Crossing’ dates [from] about a year later than the ‘Golden Calf’, and the date proposed by Mr Mahon, 1637-8, seems to me the most likely.”

“Flight and Thanksgiving”: that encapsulation of the Melbourne Poussin is not only apt to the picture, but those themes and indeed the picture itself, are also emblematic for Dr Hoff’s arrival in Australia and her subsequent career. It is clear that both her arrival here and the elements of the Jewish diaspora in general, and the Holocaust or Shoah in particular, had strong resonances in 1948. Melbourne is a very cosmopolitan city: both it and London were major destinations of Jewish and other refugees, particularly those fleeing Nazism and other earlier European pogroms; and later, for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Thus, it is fitting that these two pendant pictures, from the hand of a French Catholic (and Stoic) Classical painter, long resident in self-imposed exile at Rome, should have arrived in these two cities, which in both of the two decades either side of 1948, saw so many like arrivals of European refugees from barbarities of the modern types, but perhaps not far removed from some of those that Poussin knew. His father had been ruined by the circumstances of the Wars of Religion. He liked to refer to the terrible turnings of “that blind madwoman, Fortune”.

There are larger issues here: and these matters are also intimately bound up with what John Carroll has identified as the great but untaken opportunity, so clearly presented by and in Poussin’s works, for the particular kind of Counter-Reformation which just might have saved Europe its decline. Whether such a turning in Europe’s cultural history could have forestalled the likes of the wars of 1914 and 1939 is moot; one rather doubts it. Those are thoughts for another day; yet Poussin’s works are a good starting point for those who wish to think seriously about the West, its trajectory and its prospects for renewal in what are again terrible times. Perhaps, just as during the Second World War, when many national collections were taken down and hidden against the perils of war, there may have been in 1948, in the early Atomic Age, some feeling that a diaspora of great paintings might serve as a kind of cultural insurance against destruction and oblivion, rather as in the origins of the internet in the contemporary era. Or, to recall again T.S. Eliot’s reference (and the content of 4 Ezra): “these fragments I have shored against my ruins”.

However, one must be on guard against becoming altogether too cerebral about Poussin’s work, great though it is and shot through as it is with Arcadian, Classical and particularly Stoic, as well as Catholic, themes. Despite Poussin’s enthusiastic injunctions about the primacy of line and of drawing and the secondary place and role of colour in painting, he was quite obviously, as we see from his pictures, a supreme colourist too. This is readily apparent even in The Crossing of the Red Sea. Indeed, the Melbourne picture embodies nearly all of the characteristic colours, including rich rose-reds, vibrant blues and warmed yellows, which we can see in so many of his other works, including the great Seven Sacraments cycles, as well as many of his other biblical works.

This reminds us to heed Sir Denis Mahon’s dictum that: “Poussin is not [just] a peintre-philosophe [or a “pictor philosophicus” as Blunt and others would have it]. He is a peintre-peintre.” Mahon said, “Blunt just couldn’t read the pictures as paintings. He read them as images rather than opere fatte di mano … [Poussin] makes use of the stories he chooses for his own purposes. The French love a soi-disant intellectual and Poussin was a typical Frenchman.” Mahon’s refreshing view returns us to the pictures themselves. That is why Australia is fortunate to have one.

The year 2009 is the centenary of Dr Ursula Hoff’s birth. Among her other achievements at the NGV, Melbourne’s great Poussin symbolises and is an eloquent testimony to her lifework as a scholar and as a curator.

The Crossing of the Red Sea, which is now known worldwide as the Melbourne Poussin, is arguably the single most important painting, in art historical terms, hanging in any Australian public gallery. For that reason alone, it deserves our attention—and also our thoughtfulness. Many people go out of their way, when in Melbourne, to view the celebrated painting of Chloe in Young & Jackson’s Hotel bar, opposite Flinders Street station. That tradition has its place; but upstairs in Sir Roy Grounds’ (fairly recently refurbished) NGV main building on St Kilda Road, there are far greater things to be seen. Perhaps the best of them is Nicolas Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea. We have Dr Ursula Hoff, among others, to thank for its presence there.

Through the modern revival of the serious study of Poussin’s art, we learn again to transcend the prejudices of our own time and place. We are brought to consider anew how artists and thinkers in distant epochs regarded and understood themselves and what they meant by their works, rather than imposing our own latter-day views and judgments upon them and their work. Hence we might avoid, if only for a few privileged moments and in one special field, that limiting and trivialising Historicism, which in its more or less crude forms has for many decades been so widespread within the study of the Humanities, and especially in the fine arts. Writings like Cropper and Dempsey’s essays, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (1996), together with close study of pictures like the major Poussin at Melbourne, help us to transcend those prevalent prejudices and so to come to understand better the intentions of a practitioner of the very first rank in the tradition of Western pictorial art.

Dr Hassall is a barrister who visits art galleries to enjoy their pictures. He wrote on the Howard Hinton Art Collection at Armidale in the June 2008 issue.