The Hay Harvest
The hay harvest is one of six in 1565 incurred the Seasons Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This 114 x 158 cm measured oil painting on wood represents the early summer and is located in Lobkowiczký palác in Prague ( Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle ).
The painting
The content and design
The viewer looks, as with most early paintings of Bruegel, of medium height on the action - so the overview is maintained without details blur in the distance. The foreground is decorated in dark, earthy tones, the middle ground in yellow and green tones and the distance in shades of blue. Thus the painter reinforces the impression of depth. The foreground falls, as well as the annual time image The Hunters in the Snow, strongly and so obscures part of the appeal. Links is located on a steep cliff a mountain monastery, the right of it is a village with a church and behind a hill with a windmill. Thereafter, the landscape opens with a view of a mountain peak and a river, and above all, a blue, glistening summer sky arches with fair weather clouds.
Market -goers bring in the right foreground goods for sale, are left in the opposite direction three harvest helpers go. It is an old woman, a young and middle-aged - only the young woman looks to the viewer. In the left front corner man dengelt a scythe and thus forms a contrast to the dynamic movements in the foreground. It is therefore an important part of the composition, even when the meadows actually already mowed and the harvest workers are busy with the raking and loading the Heuwagens.
Design and history
This is not a real place, but a bruegelsche overlook landscape that the artist developed from Joachim Patinier world landscape. In 1565 made on behalf of the Dutch art collector Niclaes Jonghelinck, came the hay along with five other the Seasons in 1594 as a gift for Archduke Ernst in Habsburg possession (see also: The pictures of the seasons ). For Bruegel's time, there were in northern Europe partly not yet four, but according to the natural course of the year six seasons: early spring, spring, early summer, mid-summer, autumn and winter.
After 1809 the image came under unexplained circumstances in the possession of the Countess Leopoldine Grassalkowitsch and from there as an inheritance in the collection of Prince Lobkowitz at Castle Raudnitz Roudnice nad Labem ( German: Raudnitz on the Elbe ). After the occupation of Prague by German troops, this collection was confiscated and provided the hay for a planned museum in Linz. Since the end of the war, the painting was on loan from the Lobkowitz family in the National Gallery in Prague. The current exhibition is Lobkowiczký palác ( Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle ).