Allegory and social mores in Abraham Bosse’s L’Hyver

Abstract

ABSTRACT The prints of Abraham Bosse (1602–1676) are widely appreciated as documents of the daily life of his bourgeois contemporaries, detailing their clothing, décors and social comportment. This article, taking Bosse’s season print L’Hyver as a case study, underlines the variety of print genres and textual traditions that the artist draws upon to locate his scenes in a cloudier zone between allegory and the description of mores. Crucial to the discussion at hand is the allusion within the print’s imagery and marginal verse to the rape of Proserpine from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woven into a wintry representation of Mardi Gras. These factors are considered against the backdrop of Bosse’s Seasons series as a whole. Ultimately, it is proposed that Bosse’s work provides us with a valuable insight into the lives of his contemporaries – especially, the patterns of knowledge required to unpick the subtleties of his allegorical play.