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The Harvesters,
1565 This panel is part of an extended series showing the seasons or times of the year commissioned from Bruegel by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck. The series must have included six works, and all but one of these have survived. The panels are, in addition to The Harvesters: The Gloomy Day, Hunters in the Snow, The Return of the Herd (all in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and Haymaking (in the Roudnice Lobkowicz collection, Nelahozeves, Czech Republic). The ultimate sources for the seasonal subject matter in these pictures were illuminated calendar cycles; each painting in Bruegel’s sequence has been associated with particular months or times of the year based on comparison with activities depicted in these earlier works. The wheat harvest, represented in our panel, can be related to the months of August and September. This remarkable group of pictures is a watershed in the history of Western art. The religious pretext for landscape painting—so strictly adhered to by artists of both the northern and southern Renaissance—has been abandoned, and we have in its place a new humanism, at once pastoral and vernacular. Although the panels are often compared in spirit to Virgil’s Georgics, widely read and admired by cultivated Europeans of the sixteeenth century, Bruegel was hardly a propagandist for peasant virtue or the joys of the yeoman’s life celebrated by the poet; rather he was a passionate observer of nature in all its forms, incuding human nature, with a genius for narrative and the defining gesture.
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