The Harvesters
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (About 1525 to 1569) · 1565
A field of ripe wheat fills the foreground, golden and heavy, and a group of peasants has stopped for their midday meal in the shade of a pear tree. One man lies flat on his back, asleep with his legs apart. Others eat bread and porridge, cut cheese and drink from jugs. Beyond them the reapers are still at work, cutting a path through the standing corn, and beyond that the land drops away to a village, a church, a bay with ships, and a hazy horizon that seems to go on forever. It is late summer, and the whole picture smells of warm straw.
The painting is one of a series of six showing the months of the year that Bruegel painted for a merchant in Antwerp. Look at how he organises the scene: the tall wheat acts like a wall in the foreground, then a gap opens up and your eye slides down the swathe of cut stubble into the distance. The figures are sturdy, unidealised and drawn with affection, not mockery. Notice the woman carrying sheaves on the path, the men playing a game in the far meadow, and the tiny bathers in the pond. There is no religious subject and no story, only work, rest and weather.
That is why the picture matters. It is one of the first great Western paintings in which landscape itself is the subject and people are simply part of it. The Met bought it in 1919, and it is the only painting from the series in the Americas; three of the others are in Vienna, one in Prague, and one is lost.
Did You Know? The sleeping harvester's pose was copied so often by later Flemish painters that it became a kind of signature of Bruegel.
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