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.’