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| Lodovico Settevecchie and Leonardo da Brescia The Four Seasons ca. 1570 fresco Castello Estense, Ferrara |
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| Neil Welliver Shadow 1977 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Stuart Franklin Deer Farm at the Rothiemurcus Estate 2009 inkjet print Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh |
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| Howard Hodgkin Spring Rain 2000-2002 oil on panel Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| François Barois Pomona, or, Spring ca. 1693-1705 marble term Musée du Louvre |
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| Alfred Edward Chalon Herb Gatherer (illustration for 'Spring' in Thomson's Seasons) 1810 drawing British Museum |
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| Charles Demuth Spring 1921 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Oleksandr Bohomazov Rayonist Composition: Spring 1914 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Maurice Denis Badminton 1900 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Séraphine Tree of Paradise ca. 1928 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Joan Eardley Harvest 1960 oil on panel Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh |
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| Kazimir Malevich To the Harvest: Marthe and Vanka ca. 1928-29 oil on canvas State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg |
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| Abraham van Diepenbeeck Harvest Feast before 1675 ink and wash on paper British Museum |
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| Ettore Tito Autumn 1914 oil on canvas Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome |
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| Maurice de Vlaminck Autumn Landscape ca. 1905 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Charmion von Wiegand The Wheel of the Seasons 1957 oil on canvas Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York |
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| Meissen Manufactory (Dresden) Figures of the Four Seasons 18th century porcelain Musée du Louvre |
Most readers, at the present day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken. As we see him now, in that long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and, above all else, he possessed the quality which cut him off from his contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was modern. Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world – to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspection amid the solitudes of the heart. Who can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad? Who can wonder that, in his agitation, his perplexities, his writhings, he seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend? 'Cet homme est un forcené!' Diderot exclaims. 'Je tâche en vain de faire de la poésie, mais cet homme me revient tout à travers mon travail; il me trouble, et je suis comme si j'avais à côté de moi un damné: il est damné, cela est sûr . . . J'avoue que je n'ai jamais éprouvé un trouble d'âme si terrible que celui que j'ai . . . Que je me revois plus cet homme-là, il me ferait croire au diable et à l'enfer. Si je suis jamais forcé de retourner chez lui, je suis sûr que je frémirai tout le long du chemin: j'avais la fièvre en revenant . . . On entendait ses cris jusqu'au bout du jardin; et je le voyais! . . . Les poètes ont bien fait de mettre un intervalle immense entre le ciel and les enfers. En vérité, la main me tremble.' Every word of that is stamped with sincerity; Diderot was writing from his heart. But he was wrong; the 'intervalle immense' across which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of what he had never seen before, was not the abyss between heaven and hell, but between the old world and the new.
– Lytton Strachey on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1907)
