L.N.: Poussin, as I said.
The small selection of non seafood includes chewy flank steak ($15.50), excellent with béarnaise; crisp, nutty veal sweetbreads ($14.50); and gently flavored poussin ($13.50), which I liked with sharp mustard.
Of the pictures, what gave me the most pleasure was the Magdalen of Guido, infinitely superior to that by Le Brun in the church of the Carmelites at Paris; the Virgin, by Titian; a Madonna, by Raphael; but not comparable to that which is in the Palazzo de Pitti, at Florence; and the death of Germanicus, by Poussin,º which I take to be one of the best pieces in this great collection.
He was also a foremost expert on the work of the 17th century classical French painter Nicolas Poussin, an enthusiasm I shared with him, being (as was Picasso) a great Poussin fan myself.
"I suppose you would say Poussin, erm, Goya - I say that also because my wife is a great Goya expert.
(I stuff poussins with it).
I love that Poussin painting, "Et in Arcadia ego": young shepherds in an idyllic garden come across a tomb engraved with these words ("I, too, was in Arcadia once").
Two out of the three times I had the poussin, cooked on a plancha, it was a marvel of tender meat under crisp skin, and the panzanella salad around it turned this entree into the abundant antithesis of a small plate.
Outsider is a delicious read and the few glimpses of Blunt it does afford are tantalising: his involvement with the forger extraordinaire, Eric Hebborn; his deep upset on first seeing the "great and unprecedented" Poussin exhibition at the Louvre ("I was wrong," he muttered over and over).
In my gay science fiction novel Mirage, from 1991, I brought in Poussin's "The Baptism of Christ" at the National Gallery in Washington as a symbol for passions that are impossible to suppress.
