The Harvesters

Painted in 1565, The Harvesters belongs to Bruegel's celebrated series of panels depicting the months or seasons of the year, commissioned by the Antwerp merchant and collector Nicolaes Jongelinck. Five panels from the series survive; this one, representing late summer and the month of August, entered the collection of the Counts of Schwarzenberg before eventually passing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has been held since 1919 and stands as one of the museum's most visited works. At the time of its creation Bruegel was at the height of his powers, having already produced the Tower of Babel compositions and moving toward the great winter landscape of Hunters in the Snow, painted in the same year. The cycle as a whole represented a profound expansion of the calendar tradition inherited from Flemish illuminated manuscripts: Bruegel translated the marginal laboring peasant of the Book of Hours into the monumental protagonist of panel painting, insisting that the work of ordinary Flemish men and women deserved the full scale and pictorial intelligence previously reserved for sacred or courtly subjects. Art historians have read the series as both a celebration and a sober accounting of the agricultural world, free of the moralizing overlay that characterizes much of Bruegel's earlier work and striking instead for its quality of attentive observation.