The Harvesters

The Harvesters is one of a set of paintings of the times of the year that the Antwerp merchant banker Niclaes Jongelinck commissioned from Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1565. The set was probably six panels, and five survive today. This one stands for late summer, the months of July and August. Three of its companions, including Hunters in the Snow, hang in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and a fourth is in Prague. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has owned this painting since 1919. Bruegel joined the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551, travelled in Italy, and spent the late 1550s designing prints for the city's leading publisher before making painting his main work. He was one of the first artists to paint landscapes and scenes of peasant life as large, serious pictures. All his famous paintings come from the last decade or so of his life before he died in 1569, probably in his early forties.