Spring Scattering Stars

What you are looking at

A young woman with long red-gold hair stands upright on the lower curve of a huge crescent moon, its horns pointing upward around her like a bowl. She is nude, her body pale and softly lit by the moon beneath her. With her right hand she draws a garland or a trail of tiny white stars and blossoms from the crook of her left arm and lets them fall, and more stars drift across the deep blue-green sky around her. Behind her, half hidden, a small winged child or putto leans against her legs. At lower right, a bank of grey cloud rolls up against the moon.

The palette is almost entirely cool: teal, turquoise and slate blue, warmed only by the figure's skin and hair and the glow of the moon. Blashfield paints the sky with a fine, granular texture, like spattered paint, so the whole surface seems to sparkle.

The wet moon

The moon's position is a deliberate detail. When the crescent lies on its back with its horns pointing up, folklore calls it a "wet moon," a cup that holds water, or alternatively a dry one that will spill no rain. Blashfield uses it as a pedestal, a cradle from which Spring sends out new life, linking the moon's cycle to the cycle of the seasons.

The artist

Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848–1936) trained in Paris under Léon Bonnat and became one of the leading muralists of the American Renaissance, the movement that decorated public buildings in the decades around 1900 with classical allegories. His murals include the dome of the Library of Congress reading room in Washington and numerous state capitols and courthouses. Allegorical female figures representing ideas, seasons or virtues were his stock in trade, and this easel painting, made late in his career, distills that public style into an intimate, decorative image.

Meaning

Spring traditionally scatters flowers; Blashfield has her scatter stars, merging the renewal of the earth with the night sky. The image is a poetic personification rather than a myth with a fixed text, belonging to the same symbolic world as Victorian and Symbolist paintings of night and the seasons.

Where is it now?

The painting appeared at Heritage Auctions from the estate of the collector Charles Martignette and is in a private collection. For other night skies in the catalogue, see Starlight, Munch's Starry Night and Light Academia.