Ceres (Summer)

Ceres (Summer) personifies the Roman goddess of the harvest as one of the four seasons, an allegory that Antoine Watteau painted in the years before his early death. The goddess of grain and agriculture sits crowned with the fruits and sheaves that mark her province, her image treated with the lightness and grace that distinguish the artist who founded the fête galante. Painted about 1717 and 1718, and long part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection, the oval canvas shows the gentle poetry and the warm colouring that carried French painting from the grandeur of the high Baroque toward the delights of the Rococo.