The Harvesters

This was made for a wealthy Antwerp merchant, Niclaes Jonghelinck, who wanted a set of large panels of the seasons for the dining room of his house outside the city. Six were painted, and five survive. This one is late summer, the wheat harvest of July and August, and it was a strange thing to hang on a wall in 1565. Landscape until then was mostly a backdrop for a saint or a Bible scene. Here there is no story. The whole picture is just the countryside on a hot day and the people working and resting in it. Look at the man asleep under the pear tree in the middle, sprawled with his legs open, done in by the heat, while others cut a path through wheat that stands taller than they are. Off in the distance you can see people swimming, a village, a church, ships on the water. The Metropolitan, which has held it since 1919, calls it a watershed in Western painting, and the first modern landscape.