The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is a 1565 oil and tempera painting on wood panel depicting Dutch farmers and peasants reaping the wheat fields of the late summer and autumn harvest season. While a group gathers around a tree for a picnic dinner, some sleep in the shade. Farmers cut grain with scythes, while others gather and bundle the harvest. The vast, panoramic Dutch landscape of fields and village is both an iconic image of Western art and a high point of Bruegel’s lifetime of landscape painting and observation of daily life, capturing both the hard life and nobility of the peasants and common people of his time. Pieter Bruegel (Brueghel) the Elder (c. 1525 - 1569) was a Dutch/Flemish painter and printmaker of the Northern Renaissance. Among the first artists to incorporate subject matter from landscape and the life of common people, Bruegel all but invented the art of Dutch genre painting. Bruegel painted a number of religious works but is best known for his lively, allegorical paintings of peasants and witty commentary and on life, sin and virtue. His innovative compositions and carefully observed, realistic details influenced many generations of artists, from Rembrandt through the Realists of the modern era.