The Harvesters

This panel is part of a series showing the seasons or times of the year, commissioned from Bruegel by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck. The series included six works, five of which survive. The other four are: The Gloomy Day, Hunters in the Snow, and The Return of the Herd (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna); and Haymaking (Lobkowicz Collections, Prague). This remarkable group of pictures is a watershed in the history of Western art. The religious pretext for landscape painting has been suppressed in favor of a new humanism, and Bruegel's unidealized description of the local scene is based on natural observations.