The Harvesters

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Harvesters in 1565, in Antwerp, for a series of six panels representing the seasons or times of the year. The series was commissioned by Niclaes Jongelinck, a wealthy merchant who owned at least 16 Bruegel paintings. Five of the six panels survive. The other four are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Lobkowicz Collections in Prague. The Harvesters is the only one in the United States, and it is one of the most important Northern Renaissance paintings in the Met's collection. The painting shows a wheat harvest in late summer, probably August or September. A field of ripe wheat fills the middle ground, partially cut and stacked in bundles. In the foreground, a group of peasants sit under a pear tree, eating lunch. Some sleep, some talk, one leans back with his mouth open as if drinking from a jug. Around them, work continues: three men cut wheat with scythes, two women gather bundles, and other figures make their way through the corridor of standing grain. In the distance, the landscape opens into a wide panorama of fields, roads, a river, and a harbor with ships. The sky fills the upper third of the canvas, painted in a warm, hazy blue. Bruegel was about 40 in 1565 and at the height of his career. He had moved from Antwerp to Brussels the previous year, and he was producing the large landscape and peasant paintings that are his greatest achievement. The Seasons series was a watershed in the history of Western art. Before Bruegel, landscapes had almost always served as backdrops for religious or mythological scenes. In The Harvesters, the religious pretext has fallen away. The subject is the landscape itself and the people who work in it. The painting is not a record of a real place. Bruegel assembled it from drawings, observation, and imagination. The landscape around Antwerp is flat, but Bruegel painted hills and a harbor that do not exist there. The wheat field is observed with extraordinary precision: each stalk is painted individually, and the color shifts from ripe gold in the foreground to hazy yellow in the distance. The figures are painted in the same careful detail, their bodies and clothing described with the same attention as the landscape. Oil on wood, 119 by 162 centimeters. Bruegel painted with a fine brush, building the wheat field in thousands of small, individual strokes of yellow and gold. The figures are painted in the same careful technique, with their faces and hands described in a few precise strokes. The sky is built in thin layers of blue and white, with the haze of a hot summer afternoon. The surface has the detail and patience of a painting made by a man who looked at everything and painted what he saw. The horizontal format and warm palette make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or kitchen. The golds, greens, and blues pair with natural wood, stone floors, and rooms with a rustic or traditional character. The 18x24 size is the best choice, as the composition needs width to read. The painting has a warm, human quality that suits rooms where people eat or gather. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1919, purchased with the Rogers Fund. It is one of the most famous paintings in the museum and is on permanent display in the European Paintings galleries. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.