The Harvest

By 1860 the railway was spreading fast across Switzerland, stitching the valleys together and changing how people lived and worked. Robert Zünd wanted none of that in his picture. He kept the tracks and the telegraph poles out and painted a grain harvest that could belong to almost any century, the fields cut and gathered under a wide, calm sky. It was his first real success. A few years earlier he had gone to Paris and Dresden to copy the old Dutch and French landscape masters, Jacob van Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain among them, studying how they built depth and handled light, and that patient, close attention shows here in every stalk and leaf. The subject would not let him go. He returned to the harvest again and again across his long career. The Basel art association bought this version soon after it was first shown, and it has stayed in the city ever since.