To the Editors:
Just so that historians of the future will not be totally confused, let me set the record straight concerning the location of two famous paintings by Nicolas Poussin mentioned in Creighton Gilbert’s review of the Fort Worth exhibition (“A Fresh View of Young Poussin,” December 1988). The Death of Germanicus is, as most everyone knows, in Minneapolis, not in Detroit. The Diana and Endymion is not in Boston, but in Detroit. Unfortunately, exhibition catalogues are not the only “breeding grounds of factual errors.”
J. Patrice Marandel
Curator, European Paintings
The Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit, MI
Creighton Gilbert replies:
The correction is just. The walls at Fort Worth were graced with three very similar major Poussins, belonging to Minneapolis, Detroit, and Boston. I erred for the all too common reason that I thought I knew without checking, and so labeled Minneapolis’s as Detroit’s and Detroit’s as Boston’s. I would rather not have done it wrong, but still there was a nice compensation, in that the numerous correcting letters (to me as well as to the editors) offered surprising evidence of how widely the piece was actually read, and how closely, even to a two-word parenthesis, and implied that it did not contain any other mistakes. This one at least was “harmless,” in the legal use of the word, in that no further statements were based on it.
Mr. Marandel writes “most everyone knows” where the pictures really are, which is indeed the case with
