The Harvesters (painting)
The grain harvest is a painting in oil on wood by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The 119 × 162 cm image was created in 1565 as one of six years images, five of which have been preserved. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Image description
A slender pear tree divides the image in the golden ratio in a larger and a smaller left- right part. The left side is dominated by the vast cornfields that stretch from the foreground over a gently sloping hillside down to the ground. In the foreground, an exhausted field workers resting in the shade of the tree from outstretched, next cut sheaves are already prepared, which were cut down by two other workers harvesting with scythes. A man, heavily laden with full steins come on a cut through the field path up, while three other figures are partly with sheaves of corn on the shoulders, on the way down to the village in the middle ground. A heavily laden with the harvest wagon with draft animal is on the way to where on the intersection between some houses a lot of activity is apparent. In the background stand out among a hazy gray sky, another passed with grain fields and hills, a coastal town and a gently curving bay with some ships.
On the right side are narrower in the shade of the tree eight figures to a white cloth grouped. They sit on the already bound sheaves and take for a good lunch, which consists of porridge or soup and bread; a figure drinking from a jug, another cuts a slice from the loaf of bread, which is in a basket next to the group. Behind them is a mowed cornfield to see whose left side of a male and a female figure just bind the sheaves into bundles and set out to dry, while next to a worker cuts more grain. At one end of this work is already done. Behind two other characters are just busy trying to collect fallen fruit in a basket, a director is ready. The background is covered to a large extent from the leaves of bushes and trees, but can be gentle, grain -lined hills that make up a church tower and rooftops. In the lower right corner of the image with the painting " Brvegel / [ MD] LXV " is signed.
Classification and Reception
The grain harvest has the same format as the other four images obtained of the seasons cycle and was probably painted for the same client. Each painting covers two months from the year. Assuming that the dark day for the Carnival month of February and March for the stands and the Spring image is lost, then represents the grain harvest the harvest months of August and September.
Like the other four images, the grain harvest has a dominant color or color combination, namely " the yellow of the cut ripe corn. " In the grain harvest " missing the dance- border people " from the hay harvest. The working men and women rest from the hard work in the summer heat or served by a meal in the shade. Bruegel has used the " subject [s ] of the sleeper under the tree [ ... ] two years later in the picture from the land of plenty. "
In the description of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the seasonal cycle is honored as " a watershed in the history of Western art "; for landscape painting needs Bruegel no religious excuse anymore, but uses his in-depth knowledge of the composition principles of the Italian Renaissance to represent an unvarnished view of the countryside.
For Birgit Kersten, the painting is a reflection of the prosperity of the occupied by the Spanish Netherlands before it came to rebellion under the harsh regime of the Duke of Alba. Kersten points to the paramount importance of cereals in the diet of people in the time and the catastrophic consequences of crop failure. Bruegel 'm obviously not the representation of individuals ( the figures in the picture are often displayed with the face turned away with little or no detailed facial features ), " but more likely to make people during their work in nature. "
Provenance
Like the other pictures of the seasons was one of the the grain harvest in 1566 Nicolaes Jonghelinck in Antwerp, then Hane of Wijke ( also Antwerp), who for 1,400 guilders sold to the city council of Antwerp in 1594, so they Archduke Ernst of Austria, governor of the Netherlands, for the gift could be made. In the inventory of his estate of 1595 the images than the numbers 7-12 appear with the description " Six Taffell, to 12 months' Henn of Jars of Bruegel ". The images changed then in the possession of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and went to his death in 1612 to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria ( as Archduke Ernst governor of the Netherlands ). In his inventory of 1659, however, only the talk of " Fünff large Stuckh a large scale, the Zeithen warin desz year of Öhlfarb on Holcz [ ... ] Originally from the old Brögel. " Leopold Wilhelm died in 1662, whereupon the Emperor Leopold I. received the images. They were part of the imperial collection in Vienna. From there, the images were in part their separate ways. The grain harvest was in 1809 to Count Antoine -François Andréossy, the French governor of Vienna, who took the painting to Paris in 1816 and sold for 90 francs and 11 centimes to Jacques Antoine Doucet. The description of the sale is " From a master of the old German school [ ... ] a landscape in exquisite detail, with the representation of harvesting [ ... ] Length 58 inches, Height 44 inches. " Paul Jean Cels in Brussels the image of Doucet acquired yet before the year 1912. Cels bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, the image with funds from the estate of Jacob S. Rogers, a locomotive manufacturer, who donated to the museum upon his death in 1901 the greater part of its assets. " Brvegel / [ MD] LXV ": When the painting was cleaned in 1920, the signature and parts of dating were visible.