Grimshaw, MikeM2019-01-072019-01-0720192463-333Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10092/16379http://dx.doi.org/10.26021/181English novelist Antony Powell (1905-2000) is best known for his 12-voume novel A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) [hereafter Dance]. The title is in reference to Poussin’s great painting of the same name – painted 1634-1636 – held in the Wallace Collection in London. In the painting, the standard interpretation is that the Four Seasons dance in a circle, holding hands and facing outwards while Time plays his lyre; the painting being generally taken to represent “the perpetual cycle of the human condition”. Yet as Powell notes in his memoirs, when he encountered the painting at the very beginnings of planning and writing the Dance sequence, the painting “expressed at least one important aspect of what the novel must be”; that is, the “figures are dancing to Time’s tune” and while they can be taken to represent the seasons, for Powell they “seem no less ambiguous as Pleasure, Riches, Poverty, Work, or perhaps Fame.”enThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Journal Article