Andrew Lambirth

Getting to know Powell

Most novel-readers will be aware that Anthony Powell’s celebrated roman-fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time is named after and inspired by Poussin’s great painting in the Wallace Collection. As Jeremy Warren, head of collections at the Wallace and this exhibition’s curator, points out: ‘Both novel and picture examine the nature of mortality and the strange mixture of predetermination and hazard to which human relationships appear to be subject.’ Poussin was one of Powell’s favourite painters, and the ambiguity of his famous image was evidently a useful and compelling source for the fictional dance of Powell’s characters. In the novelist’s centenary year, the Wallace Collection devotes its first exhibition to a writer — to the complex interweaving of art and literature which underpinned Powell’s writing life.

Anthony Powell (1905–2000) nearly became an artist before he was a writer. In his memoirs he notes, ‘I cannot remember a time when I did not draw.’ His first appearance in print was with the reproduction of his drawing ‘Colonel Caesar Cannonbrains of the Black Hussars’ in The Eton Candle, the journal of the Eton Arts Society. It has a slightly Beardsley-like quality to it, attesting to Powell’s continuing fascination with the art of the 1890s, but also some of the boldness of the Beggarstaff Brothers’ poster designs. It’s shown here in a vitrine adjacent to a spirited 1973 pen-and-crayon sketchbook drawing entitled ‘Project for a Mural’, signed Antonio ‘Rivera’ Powell, in parody of the famous Mexican muralist. Throughout this small but dense exhibition, Powell’s own visual sense is firmly on view — whether in his choice of art to collect, artists to illustrate his books or in his own artwork, particularly his passion for collage.

Powell’s Regency villa in Somerset, The Chantry, was filled with collaged objects, an effect extended to the entire boiler-room and rather difficult to reproduce in the neat temporary exhibition space of the Wallace.

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