Its title is taken from Nicolas Poussin's 1634–36 painting of the same name.[1] Through the eyes of a narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, the reader observes the changing fortunes of a varied collection of mainly upper-class characters.[2] Their ambience is a bohemian world of art, literature and music, intermingled with the more practical spheres of politics, business and the military.[3] In a 1971 study of the novels, the journalist and editor Dan McLeod summarised the theme of the sequence as that of a decaying establishment, confronted by "aggressive representatives from the middle classes elbowing their way up".