Harvest in Chepinsko

This is harvest time in the Chepino valley, the largest of the valleys folded into the Rhodope mountains of southern Bulgaria. Angelov painted it in 1905, when the country was less than 30 years out of Ottoman rule and almost everyone in it still lived by the land. He builds the scene with a deliberate, classical calm. The reapers are spaced across the stubble in a clear order, and the whole field is drawn into one warm, even tone, so the heavy work of cutting and gathering the grain reads as something steady and dignified. Nothing in it is hurried. The eye travels back across the cut wheat toward the pale line of hills that closes the valley, the reapers, the field and the mountains all held in the same midday light.