A drawing of several figure groups of men struggling with women, preparatory for a composition of the Rape of the Sabine women.

The Rape of the Sabine women allowed the depiction of a whole range of emotions and of intricately posed groups of bodies in violent action, and was thus a perfect subject for the artist to prove his skills. Poussin painted two versions, one now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York for the duc de Créqui in 1633-34, the other in the Louvre for Cardinal Aluigi Omodei, at a date unknown but probably shortly after the New York version.

In the confidence with which Poussin treated complex spatial relationships, and in the sureness of his line and the application of wash, the three main figure groups here bear every sign of having being drawn from small three-dimensional models. The soldier lifting the woman into the air at the left was carried over unchanged (except for the addition of drapery) to the New York painting; the other two groups were not used in either composition. The figures in the background, fitted around the washed nude groups, are much more sketchily drawn but in places are very close to the painting, and it seems likely that Poussin was here simply filling in detail from an earlier compositional sketch to try the effect of the figure groups against a tangled background. Indeed the painting works more successfully when considered as an assemblage of independent groups in space rather than as flat pattern.

On the verso is a faint preparatory drawing for the Adoration of the Shepherds (London, National Gallery), though the scratchy black chalk is swamped by the ink staining through from the recto, and very difficult to see in reproductions. The figural part of the composition is drawn in virtually its final form, with the Madonna kneeling over the Child in the lower right, Joseph and an ass behind her, the shepherds bowing down at the centre and a maid approaching with a basket of fruit. The function of the drawing is hard to discern, as it is not a sketch, but rather appears to be an abandoned underdrawing for a finished, modello-like sheet. Just such a drawing for this composition is in the British Museum - the authorship of that sheet has been disputed, but it does seem to be autograph, the rather formal handling being explained by the function of the sheet.

The sketch on the verso must presumably have been executed before the drawing for the Rape of the Sabine women on the recto, for the strength of the ink on the recto would prevent the artist drawing in chalk as lightly as here, even allowing for increased staining through with time. Thus the planning of the Adoration of the Shepherds had reached an advanced stage before that of the New York Rape of the Sabine women, and it follows that the London painting was designed (and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, executed) by 1633 at the latest. This is in accord with the recent consensus on the dating of the London painting; some of the darker pigment has sunk into the ground, giving it the paler tonality typical of the later 1630s, but the figure types and the handling of flesh, drapery and landscape are very similar to the London Adoration of the Golden Calf, finished by 1634, and the Dresden Adoration of the Magi, dated 1633.