Ploughman with a Team of Oxen
Unknown · Archaic period, c. 575-550 BC
Two oxen under a yoke pull a plough across a flat clay plaque, and behind them a man walks holding the handle. Everything is modelled by hand: the beasts' thick bodies, the pole of the plough running back between them, the little pellets of clay pressed on for their eyes. The whole group was covered with a white slip and painted, red on the man's tunic and boots, red and black on the oxen, red on the plough and on the plaque, where five parallel lines mark the furrows. The scene is twenty two centimetres wide. The man's right arm and one of the horns are lost, and many fragments have been glued back together.
Boeotia, the farming country north of Athens, produced these lively hand made terracottas in the sixth century BC, and they were placed in tombs, perhaps to give the dead the work and the plenty of the land. This one was found at Thebes and dates to about five hundred and seventy five to five hundred and fifty BC, the age of the Boeotian poet Hesiod's readers, who knew every gesture of the plough. The Louvre bought it in eighteen ninety.
Did You Know? The eyes of the oxen are little pellets of clay pressed onto the heads, a technique Greek potters called pastillage.
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