Allegory of Summer

The figure on the chariot is Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and harvest, and in this set of four seasons summer stands for fire. Of the four canvases, this one has the most recent history. In May 1944, with the Netherlands under German occupation, it came up at an auction in The Hague and was bought through an Amsterdam dealer for the museum Hitler planned for Linz, which was never built. At the end of the war it was among the works recovered at Altaussee in Austria. It went to the Allied collecting point in Munich and returned to the Netherlands in 1946. There it joined the NK collection, the works the Dutch state administers because they were stolen, seized or sold during the Nazi regime. The painting has hung in the Mauritshuis since 1992, first on loan, and in 2010 the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands transferred it into the museum's keeping.