The Crossing of the Red Sea

Poussin was the most intellectual painter of his age, and he built pictures like arguments. Look at how the crowd is organised into groups, each with its own gesture and its own colour: a woman in yellow kneels beside a man in blue, a figure in red hauls a breastplate from the water, and the whole mass of bodies rises in a diagonal toward Moses and the sky. The colours are saturated and clear, in the manner of Titian, whom Poussin studied in Venice, but the drawing is sharp and sculptural. The distant landscape, with its rocky headland and stormy light, is painted with a freedom that surprises people who think of Poussin as cold.

The two paintings stayed together for three centuries, passing through the collection of the Earls of Radnor at Longford Castle in England, until they were separated in 1948 when Melbourne bought this one through the Felton Bequest. A major conservation project completed in 2012 removed old varnish and overpaint and brought back the brilliance of the colours; the gallery has documented the work in detail. It matters as one of the finest Poussins outside Europe, and as a demonstration of the classical ideal that shaped French painting for two centuries. The memorable detail is the small dog in the foreground, unmoved by the miracle.

Did You Know? Its companion painting, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, hangs in the National Gallery in London; the pair were separated in 1948.