The Harvesters

The Harvesters is one of the best-known works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and forms part of a series of six paintings on the months of the year, of which five survive. Dated 1565, it depicts late summer, with the wheat harvest as its central activity. Bruegel does not paint the peasants as isolated figures set against a backdrop; instead they are immersed in their daily labour. Some cut the wheat while others rest, and a few eat bread and cheese in the shade, so the picture shows both the production of food and its consumption. On the right, a figure climbs a tree to pick pears, and further along another shakes apples from a branch. Towards the centre left, a group of villagers takes part in a cockfight, a detail that reflects the everyday customs and pastimes of sixteenth-century rural life.

What gives the painting its historical weight is its treatment of the landscape. Bruegel does not use it as mere scenery for the figures, as was often the case in Venetian painting, but as the main subject. The sense of depth is built through the fields stretching toward the horizon, the workers crossing the clearing, the people bathing in a pond, the children at play and the distant ships. For this reason, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has been since 1919, regards it as a milestone in the history of Western art. The work also anticipated the interest in landscape that later Flemish Baroque painters, such as Rubens, would develop.

Painted in oil on wood, the composition, with its foreground of field and high horizon, adds to this impression of expansiveness. Today it is one of the pieces that best sums up Bruegel's view of country life: unidealised, yet granted a dignity and presence that few painters had given it before.

Painter

Pieter Brueghel the Elder

Date

1565

Medium

oil paint, panel

Dimensions

116 × 160 cm

Museum

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Movement

Northern Renaissance

Genre

genre art

Depicts

sitting, scythe, summer, pitcher, broad-leaved tree, group of humans, sea, church building

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