Pomona Receives the Harvest of Fruit

Pomona, the Roman goddess of orchards and fruit, was a minor deity whose mythology centred on her resistance to suitors and her eventual marriage to Vertumnus, the god of seasons who disguised himself as an old woman to gain access to her garden and win her love. Cornelis van Haarlem's 1626 panel in what is catalogued as the Munich Central Collecting Point depicts Pomona receiving the harvest's abundance — a subject combining female divinity with still-life richness in the tradition of allegorical plenty. This late work, painted when Cornelis was over sixty, shows his continued engagement with mythological subjects while reflecting the shift in northern European taste toward more relaxed figure treatments. Pomona's garden setting permitted combination of the female figure with landscape and the still-life abundance of fruit and vegetables that was increasingly valued as an independent subject in early seventeenth-century northern painting.

Panel with Cornelis's late manner: smoother, more classical figure treatment than his dynamic 1580s-90s work, with warm flesh modelling and careful attention to the decorative abundance of fruit around the figure. The compositional organisation emphasises the harvest bounty as much as the figure herself, reflecting the period's growing interest in still-life.