Portrait of a Young Lady as Ceres

Ceres was the Roman goddess of grain, agriculture, and the fertility of the earth—the counterpart to the Greek Demeter—and her identification in portraiture was signalled through attributes of wheat sheaves, a sickle, or a cornucopia. Dressing a young woman as Ceres in a Rococo portrait carried associations of abundance, nurturing, and the bounty of nature. The Brooke Robinson Museum in Bewdley, Worcestershire, which holds this undated Nattier portrait, is a modest provincial museum founded on the bequest of a local collector—a reminder that Rococo French portraits spread well beyond the great national institutions through the mechanisms of aristocratic travel, gifting, and inheritance. The sitter's identity is unknown, but the quality of the work suggests she was a woman of social standing commissioning a fashionable Paris portrait. Nattier's Ceres portraits are less common than his Diana or Hébé depictions, giving this work a degree of rarity within his allegorical output.

Ceres attributes—wheat ears, a sickle, warm golden tones associated with harvest—give this composition a warmer, more earth-toned character than Nattier's cooler Diana portraits. The fabric drapery may incorporate the ochre and amber tones of ripe grain.