The Harvesters

The man stretched beneath the tree has found a good place to sleep. Beside him, workers eat from bowls while others keep cutting the wheat. Pieter Bruegel the Elder gives you both the meal and the work that makes it possible in this landscape of 1565. Follow the cleared strip from the foreground toward the tree. Tall wheat becomes stubble, then bundles, and the bending woman on the right nearly repeats the shape of a sheaf. Farther away, people collect apples and move through the fields. Bruegel keeps giving you smaller activities to find as your eye travels toward the distant water. This panel belonged to a cycle of six seasonal paintings commissioned by an Antwerp merchant for his country-house dining room. Its first viewers could eat while looking at other people producing food. The broad, golden fields offered that wealthy urban household an orderly, abundant picture of rural life. Even the rest happens within the rhythm of work. The sleeping man lies beside the standing wheat, with the harvest continuing a few steps from his feet.