The Four Seasons: Summer: Putti Reaping (after Edmé Bouchardon)

French School. Oil painting (en cama?eu/cirage) on canvas (oval), The Four Seasons: Summer: Putti Reaping (after Edmé Bouchardon), French School 19th-20th century. One of a set of four. These half-heartedly illusionistic paintings are adaptations of the reliefs carved on the Fontaine de Grenelle in Paris by Jaques-Edme Bouchardon, from 1739. Bought by Mrs Bambridge in 1958. Summer represented by three full-length, naked putto in the process of reaping a field of corn. The left putto is turned to the right, carrying a sickle in his right hand but is prevented from cutting a sheaf of corn by the presence of a butterfly which he reaches out to with his left hand. The centre putto is kneeling, with his back to the spectator and is turned to the right, his hands cannot be seen as they are behind the right putto who has his back to the spectator but his head is turned to the right, his legs spread out, as he gathers a sheaf of corn with he left arm and begins to cut it with his sickle which he holds in his right hand. In the left foreground is a wicker-encased wine-bottle, lying on a tied sheaf of corn. Between the left and centre putto is a wild poppy and beneath the sheaf of corn on the right is a convolvulus. There is a tree in the near background on the left, and a field of corn across the whole of the back, with a distant landscape. Wimpole, Cambridgeshire (Accredited Museum)