Artwork Information

Although Wilkie is now best known for his genre paintings of family and village life, as a very young man he made seven paintings of literary subjects while studying at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, one of which is Ceres in search of Proserpine. He won a prize of ten guineas for the work, no mean sum at the time. In 1869, Sir George Grey acquired the painting along with Fuseli's Serpent tempting Eve and, in gifting his collection to Auckland, is responsible for helping introduce British Romanticism to the colony. (Monsters and Maidens, 2004)