Today’s episode takes us back to the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, whose court was every bit as frothy as the clouds the harvest goddess Ceres is lounging on. We find out crabs are sometimes lobsters and how a penniless young man from the outskirts of Paris named Antoine Watteau ended up scoring a big commission from one of the most powerful men in the court. And why this painting is now so rare!
If you want to follow along, find it here on the Gallery’s site
SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” opening and closing themes are by Ron Gelinas:
“Ascension” https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo and “Easy” https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs
Episode theme is “Violin Concerto no. 3 in G major, K. 216” composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Performed by the NOVA Community Chorus, courtesy of musopen.org
https://musopen.org/music/2863-violin-concerto-no-3-in-g-major-k-216/
Artwork information
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.46149.html
Watteau info
https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1967.html#biography
https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/18th-century-france-the-rococo-and-watteau.html#slide_1
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antoine-Watteau/Watteaus-Cythera#ref35071
Cancer crab info
https://www.britannica.com/place/Cancer-constellation
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson
Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look?
Join me at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and let’s find out!
MUSIC
Today I’m looking at Ceres (Summer) by Antoine Watteau. If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/summer. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
The tawny head of a fierce lion peering around the hip of a young woman who sits facing us on a throne of frothy clouds. He’s crouched beneath a sheaf of wheat sprouting from her right hip, on our left, and resting on his front paws.
She’s a large woman, almost filling the center of this tall oval oil painting that’s roughly 4.5 high by 4 ft wide. She holds a steel-grey sickle in her outstretched left hand, on our right. One bare foot rests on clouds piled up beneath her, like a footstool, while the other leg hangs straight down. She has lidded hazel eyes, a petite upturned nose, and a rose-red cupid bow’s mouth. A wreath of blue cornflowers, scarlet poppies and golden stalks of wheat rises from her flaxen-blonde upswept hair, in an almost pyramid shape. She wears a gauzy loose-fitting ivory-white gown that’s slipped down to reveal creamy shoulders with the fabric pushed up over her bent elbows. A pale peach robe drapes in deep folds over her lap with one end bunched on the top of the lion’s head.
She is Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest and she seems very relaxed, not at all troubled by that snarling beast, As a matter of fact, she’s leaning on him, her right forearm resting on his head.
But she and the lion have company. A girl who look maybe around 12 years old and a little boy emerge from her left hip on our right. They also have pale skin, delicate features, and blonde hair and each holds a bundle of wheat in their arms. We see them from the chest up positioned one above the other on either side of the sickle.
The boy is on top and he turns to our right with a slight smile to gaze down at the wheat in his arms. His sweet little face is framed by the curving blade shaped like a backwards C. The girl is on the bottom and she’s turned inward toward Ceres. She leans away from the blade with her eyes lowered like she looking toward the lion. Her wavy shoulder-length hair is in a ponytail and soft blue-grey shadows highlight the curves of her jawline, throat, and shoulders.
The goddess and her companions are set against an arch of pale azure-blue sky with light tan and peach-pink clouds that fills the upper half of the scene. But there’s one more guest at this gathering. A gleaming iron-grey lobster scoots up the lower left side of the clouds beneath the lion.
What I love is this dreamy diffuse warm light that bathes the people from the upper right and casts the lion and lobster into cool shadow.
MUSIC
So what’s with all the wheat? Well, Ceres was credited with teaching human beings agriculture so wheat became one of her main symbols. This was a really big deal because it allow humanity to settle down and have a more reliable food source which led to towns…cities…civilization.
Here, she represents summer when all this growing goodness is at its height. That’s why she’s surrounded by symbols of summer–the poppies, cornflowers and the summer zodiac. The kids are Gemini who inhabit late spring into early summer. The lobster is Cancer, believe it not, which starts at the longest day of the year in late June, and then the lion of course is Leo who represent the bountiful height of the season when everything’s blooming, lush, and the crops are ripening.
Now, we usually think of Cancer as the crab but it turns out that sometimes crustaceans like lobsters or crawfish have also been used. This is because the word cancer was used as a generic term for crabs and similar creatures that have 10 feet and two claws. So when artists in the Middle Ages would depict the summer zodiac, they mostly used the crab but some used this lobster-looking creature. After all, just like now, summer is when they would’ve been harvesting these guys along their coasts and rivers.
BTW, the story of how the crab became Cancer comes from Greek mythology. Hercules was fighting the Hydra when a crab pinched his toe! So of course he stomped on it. Hera, the wife of Zeus and sworn enemy of Hercules, decided to honor the brave crab by placing it in the sky and turning it into the constellation Cancer.
Ceres (Summer) was painted by Antoine Watteau, who showed up in Paris in 1702, 18-years-old and broke and found painting jobs where he could. Eventually he became a student of a theatrical set designer named Claude Gillot [zhee-low] who turned him onto the possibilities of how theater could influence his art, like how artificial light affects the appearance of color, texture, and details. He was accepted into the Royal Academy, always key to a young artist’s success and networked his way through the city’s art world. That networking paid off when he was introduced to Pierre Crozat, the incredibly powerful treasurer for the Sun King himself, Louis XIV.
Crozat had just built a fancy new house to show off his enormous art collection and hired Watteau to create a series of paintings for his dining room showing the four seasons. Watteau had a work-from-home situation since he lived at Crozat’s while working the series. The Gallery’s actually lucky to have this one because the others are gone! Spring was destroyed in a fire in 1966 and Autumn and Winter have been lost for more than a century!
OUTRO:
I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.
You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps. If you don’t want to miss an episode, you can find player links on the site or just hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you listen to podcasts!
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Thanks for joining me!