Vertumnus and Pomona

Ovid tells the story in the Metamorphoses. Pomona, goddess of fruit trees, shut herself in her orchard and refused every suitor. Vertumnus, god of the changing seasons, got in disguised as an old woman, praised her fruit, then pleaded his own case. That is the pair under the laden fruit tree, Pomona with her curved pruning knife, the old woman leaning in to talk.

In Antwerp around 1620 a small panel like this was often shared between specialists, one painting the landscape, another the figures. The Louvre credits Frans Francken the Younger, with Jan Brueghel the Younger queried, yet its own catalogue doubts both. It finds the figures too weak for Francken and gives them to his workshop, and the landscape to an assistant of the Antwerp painter Abraham Govaerts, perhaps the little-known Salomon Baulé. A Monsieur Pierret gave the panel to the museum in 1850.