Introducing a new painting- Poussin's 'Eucharist' - National Gallery - YouTube

The National Gallery has a new painting, let's take a look at it. Hello, we are here today in the conservation studio at the National Gallery with this painting which we have just acquired. It is Eucharist by Nicolas Poussin, one of the greatest artists of the 17th century, arguably the great 17th century French painter. It's a picture that he paints in Rome in the late 1630s. It's one of a series of paintings known as the Seven Sacraments and you can see here that what we're looking at is the Eucharist, so Christ is blessing the bread and the wine surrounded by his 12 disciples. The series of sacraments depicted seven of the religious rites from the Christian faith and they were incredibly famous. This series of paintings was incredibly well regarded in Poussin's day, it was so famous that someone else commissioned him to paint a second series. When these arrive in Britain in the 18th century they are celebrity paintings, they're shown at the Royal Academy, they are considered to be this great triumphant acquisition, so we are absolutely thrilled that we now have one of them in the National Gallery's collection. You can see looking at this that it's a very kind of dark atmospheric painting, that's partly what you've been working on, right? Yes, it's unusual I think for him the kind of power of the invention is kind of based on the idea of depicting an area with very very low light and how light falls and the kind of boldness of the construction is the thing and since so much of the picture is painted within a very limited tonal range in the dark areas the question of how well the varnish saturates these colors, how well it wets them, is essential to your being able to see the fine detail within the darker end of the spectrum and from that point of view it poses problems unusual I think for restoring Poussin paintings but it's been a very very rewarding thing to work on. You see the picture now toward the last phase of a treatment we've just undertaken which we'll be exploring further in a separate video. It's such an amazing picture to me, I love that we just have these you know three flames which give us almost all the light in the picture, maybe this extra little bit of light coming through the doorway there. It's so atmospheric, so shrouded in the feeling of intimacy but then you know at the same time this great cavernous space which you know we can definitely see much more clearly now thanks to the conservation treatment you've been doing with it. So we're thrilled to have this painting here as part of the collection, we are thrilled that it will very soon be going on the walls and we hope that many of you will come and see it with the rest of the 17th century French paintings here at the National Gallery.