The Return of the Herd

The Return of the Herd stands for autumn, the months of October and November, in the set of paintings of the times of the year that Pieter Bruegel the Elder made in 1565. The Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck ordered the set for his villa outside the city, where the panels probably hung around one room. Five of the original six survive, and this one is the companion of The Harvesters and Hunters in the Snow. Driving cattle down from the mountain pastures was an unusual subject in Netherlandish art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum notes that Bruegel drew on what he had seen crossing the Alps on his journey to Italy. After Jongelinck died, the city of Antwerp bought the paintings and in 1594 gave them to the Habsburg governor, Archduke Ernest of Austria. Bruegel was one of the first artists to make landscapes and peasant life the subject of large, serious paintings, and he died only four years later, in 1569.