Summer

This is one of four small panels, one for each season, and it comes out of a workshop that ran almost like a business. Pieter Brueghel the Younger inherited his famous father's designs and spent decades turning them into paintings that buyers across the Low Countries wanted on their walls. Summer is harvest time. Figures cut and bind the wheat, pick fruit, and stack hay, and in the cooler blue distance the work still goes on. Nobody here is idle. Its companion in this room is Winter, the year's other pole, painted at the same modest scale. Two complete sets of these seasons are known to survive, and this one, in Bucharest, keeps all four together.