Ceres (Summer)

Antoine Watteau

National Gallery of Art

A woman wearing a white and pale pink robe and holding a sickle sits on billowing clouds flanked by a lion and two young people in this vertical, oval painting. All three people have pale skin with rosy cheeks and blond hair. At the center of the composition, the woman, Ceres, sits facing us and she looks at us with lidded, gray eyes under faint brows. She has an oval face, small, pink, bow-shaped lips, and a dimple in her chin. Golden stalks of wheat along with pale blue cornflowers and red poppies create a crown in her upswept blond hair. Her white chemise falls off her shoulders and is loosely held in place with a rose-pink band that wraps around her right shoulder, to our left, and under the opposite arm. Shimmering, shell-pink drapery falls over her legs and covers one foot. Her other bare foot rests on a cloud like a footstool. A bundle of wheat is pinned between the fabric under her right elbow, to our left, and the lion there. With a long mane, his tawny face peers around Ceres’s hip from under the wheat. His mouth is pulled wide to expose one fang, and his pink tongue curls out of the other side. An iron-gray lobster crawls up the lower left side of the clouds beneath the lion. Ceres holds the curving blade of the sickle upright in her other hand by that hip. Near the sickle, a young woman and a child are seen from the chest up, each carrying a bundle of wheat. The young woman faces Ceres and looks off to our left, and the younger child, above her, looks down. Ceres and her companions are set against an arch of pale azure-blue sky filled with tan-colored and light pink clouds.