Allegory of Summer

A solidly built, sumptuously dressed young woman balances a ram's horn cornucopia overflowing with fruit and vegetables with her left hand and holds a sickle in her right, attributes that mark her as the Roman goddess Ceres. A table draped with a richly woven carpet is just visible in the lower right corner, while a red curtain is partially lifted to reveal several laborers harvesting wheat and loading it onto an open wagon.

Such depictions of the Four Seasons proved enduringly popular in the middle of the seventeenth century. This painting belongs to a group of works that Gregor Weber has given to the circle of Abraham Janssens II (op. cit.), son of the Antwerp painter Abraham Janssens, who spent most of his brief career in Rome producing paintings in his father's idiom for the local market. Indeed, the painting may be based on a lost work by the elder artist. The composition is known through at least two further examples, also given to an artist in Janssens' circle, including one of similar, though slightly narrower, dimensions on panel whose present location is unknown and a somewhat smaller version on canvas in the Museum Schloss Rheydt, Mönchengladbach (for these versions, see Weber, op. cit., pp. 211-212, 214-215, figs. 1 and 3). Weber singled the present painting out as a 'recht qualitätvolle' ('very high quality') version of this composition (loc. cit.).

The putative compositions of the other seasons in the series are known through surviving works: Spring (Weber, op. cit., pp. 213, 217, figs. 2, 4; plus a third example apparently unknown to Weber at the time of publication, sold Lempertz, Cologne, 18 November 2017, lot 2047, as Abraham Janssens II); Autumn (Weber, op. cit., pp. 217, 218, figs. 5, 7 and 8) and Winter (Weber, op. cit., p. 217, fig. 6).