Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Netherlandish painter, printmaker and draftsman of the sixteenth century. He was born about 1525, possibly in Breda, and died in Brussels in September 1569.

He is counted among the most important artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, and his work belongs to the wider Northern Renaissance. Bruegel is best known for landscapes and for scenes of peasant life, and he was one of the first painters to make both of those subjects the theme of large paintings.

Two of the paintings linked to him, The Hunters in the Snow, of 1565, and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, have inspired writers and filmmakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His other works include Two Chained Monkeys, Dull Gret and The Peasant Dance.

The Harvesters, the painting shown here, dates from the same year as The Hunters in the Snow. It is oil on an oak panel and shows the grain harvest in late summer, with peasants, scythes, a meal and a figure asleep in a wide landscape that takes in a church, hills and the sea. Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a merchant banker and collector in Antwerp, commissioned it as one of a cycle of six paintings of the seasons of the year.

The panel has strips added at the top, bottom and right. With them it measures 119 by 162 centimeters; the original painted surface is 116.5 by 159.5 centimeters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired the painting in 1919 through the Rogers Fund, and it is part of the museum’s European Paintings collection.