Angels appended to a family

The Holy Family is a closed group of named individuals. Angels arrive in this title as an addition to it, introduced by with and given neither a count nor a rank. Grammatically that is the weakest position an angel can occupy in a catalogue heading: not the subject, not a named participant, but an accompanying plural. It is also, across these 224 titles, one of the most common.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1630 and gives Nicolas Poussin, filed as French, with no style term recorded. The recorded dimensions are 57 x 74 cm. The measured colour family is ochre. No location is recorded.

A record with a gap

No location is recorded for this entry, so where the picture is now is simply not something the catalogue can say. The dimensions on file put it at cabinet scale rather than altar scale, and there is no style term in the record — only the century and the painter's nationality. Three works in this catalogue are by this hand, and two of them are among the entries described here.