Mirabilia and the British National Service

In the fall of 2012, the congregation of Toronto’s St. Anne’s Anglican Church teamed with the NetherMind artist collective to sponsor Mirabilia (meaning “Things causing wonder”). Some 2500 people attended the nine-day festival exhibition, lecture, and worship series held in connection with the church’s 150th anniversary. The contrast between contemporary experimental art and ancient architectural setting could not have been more striking. Designated a national historic site, St. Anne’s features an imposing Byzantine Revival dome supported by Caen stone columns and decorated with religious scenes painted in 1923 by J. E. H. MacDonald and other members of Canada’s famed Group of Seven. Mirabilia’s large-scale installations included Mary Catherine Newcomb’s immense Osiris’ Advance (Ten Thousand Soldiers) of upright grain stalks covering a wide circle between several rows of pews and a priest’s table draped in a green and gold altar cloth embroidered with heads of wheat.

St. Anne’s longstanding ecumenical tradition involves local artists and musicians for church programs, and in his festival sermon, “What Does God have to do with Art?”, Rev. Gary van der Meer noted that some visitors had found some of the art insufficiently religious. His message opened with the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zaraphath (I Kings 17:8-16) in which the prophet is divinely directed in a time of famine to ask a desitute widow for bread. Such pitiful circumstances put the woman and her son at risk of starvation, but she consents to feed the stranger. Showing remarkable generosity, she shares their meagre supply of flour and oil. Elijah then miraculously restores their provisions until the famine ended. “Wonder is happening at St. Anne’s,” proclaimed Rev. van der Meer in his Mirabilia homily, and explained the sacred nature of creative expression in theological terms:  “We are created in the image of God and therefore are creators. Our artists are living with God’s image in them by creating the art that is here. Artists are engaged in the sacred by living out God’s creating image in their own creating. …God is the first and supreme artist. …[W]e should learn more about art to learn more about God.”

In an effort to revive Great Britain’s traditional Anglican Harvest Service and promote stewardship of land and food, members of the royal family joined with civic and business leaders in 2010 to launch a series of agrarian-related initiatives including British Food Fortnight to foster school gardening projects and charitable food distribution. Royal patronage in cooperation with church leaders also sponsored the first National Harvest Service in a half-century which was held at Westminster Abbey on October 16, 2013. The service opened with Henry Alford’s popular congregational hymn, “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” (“…raise the song of harvest-home!”), followed by homilies from Owen Patterson, Secretary of State for Environment and Rural Affairs, and Dr. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London. Actor Damian Lewis read lines from Henry Birtles poem of unpretentous gratitude, “The Harvest”:

     Let’s  gather as a band of one, in symphony

          across the land
     To thank our Lord for Harvest reaped and

           gratefully as one let's stand
     To think of those, for all their toil who've readied

          plough, who've nurtured soil 
     The farmers in the fields, the cold; the hardened

           hands, the fens, the wold
     So many aspects of a life, a challenge most will

          never know
     For we in houses snugly sleep, whilst in the biting

          winds and snow
     …And through this nation memories walk, depth

          of image ever strong

     Of distant days and innocence; of man and Shire

     Horse ploughing on
Of wheat sheaves standing in the sun and

      laughing girls coming home
…For all the romance of these scenes, look not

     through glass of tinted rose
Ask farming people what it's like and though the job

     is one they chose

It takes its toll; the troughs are long and cold and

     deep
The flattened barley, missing sheep and so much

     more that blights their show
But on and on and on they go, until that day of days

     has come
The tractor's parked, the combine's quiet; the crop

     is in, the Harvest done.

---

Since the revived Westminster commemoration, the National Harvest Festival has grown to some 400 parishes and schools in Great Britain and includes services at the grand cathedrals of Canterbury, Lincoln, and Ripon. One of England’s most prolific hymnodists of the past century, Fred Pratt Green (1903-2003), composed numerous songs for these occasions including “For the Fruit of All Creation” (1970) and “Come, Sing a Song of Harvest” (1976). Pratt’s verses for these and other music show regard for earth care and social justice seldom expressed in Wesley’s generation, as well as the benefits and limits of science:

Shall we, sometimes forgetful / Of where Creation starts,

With science in our pocket / Lose wonder in our hearts.

Related National Harvest Festival events now include British Fortnight restaurant menus to “rekindle the tradition of regional British foods and the harvest,” designation of farm discovery trails and heritage crops, and community harvest celebrations and concerts. Devon Master Blacksmith Andy Hall created the official traveling British Harvest Torch sculpture that features a wrought iron vessel holding a grain sheaf and is hosted by participating churches in accordance with the National Harvest Service schedule.

BBC Television’s critically acclaimed documentary Victorian Farm (2009) drew up to four million viewers for some of its six episodes which included a mid-nineteenth-century wheat harvest. Filmed at Acton Scott Historic Farm in Shropshire, the programming was extensively based on Dr. Henry Stephens’s The Book of the Farm (1844) and other original sources that were also used by Ruth Ellen Goodman and a team of other agricultural historians to create the 2009 best-selling book Victorian Farm. The documentary’s phenomenal success rekindled widespread public interest in British country life, and led to the sequels Edwardian Farm (2010, filmed at Morwelham Quay in Devon) and Tudor Monastery Farm (2013 at Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Singleton, West Sussex). Both series also included segments on stooking and threshing grain and other period harvesting operations.

European living history (“open-air”) museums have undertaken heritage grain demonstration projects and reconstruction of harvest equipment from ancient and medieval to early modern times. The “Year on the Field” Project organized by the International Association of Agricultural Museums (AIMA) was launched in 2021 to facilitate a global exchange of ideas and experience on historical methods of grain cultivation and harvest and to promote sustainable agriculture. The project includes living history farms and museums around the world where heritage grains are cultivated and is coordinated through the Lauresham Open-Air Laboratory near Worms, Germany, which also operates Lorsch Abbey Manor Farm. Participating locations in North America include the Canada Agriculture and Farm Museum (Ottawa), Carter Historic Farm (Bowling Green, Ohio), Greenfield Village Firestone Farm (Dearborn, Michigan), Genesee Country Village (Rochester, New York), Howell Living History Farm (Titusville, New Jersey), Pleasant Hill Shaker Village (Harrodsburg, Kentucky), and Sterling College-Berry Center Farm (Port Royal, Kentucky). AIMA was founded in Prague in 1966 to facilitate East-West scholarly exchange and communication among agricultural museum staff worldwide. Headquartered in Rochdale, Massachusetts, AIMA’s North American affiliate, the Association for Living History, Farm & Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM) was founded in 1970 and publishes a quarterly Bulletin and annual Conference Proceedings.

Living History “Open-Air Museum” Farms and Self-Discovery: The European Background

Making Lefse the Old-Fashioned Way
Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo

Inspired by the architectural restoration at Bygdøy and Kristiana art scene, Swedish folklorist and museum administer Artur Hazelius (1833-1901), a native of Dalecarlia in the west-central Swedish heartland, established Skansen, the first country’s outdoor museum in Stockholm in 1891. Hazelius further envisioned centers of cultural vibrancy where artisans and workers in period costume would inhabit the historic structures and demonstrate traditional skills. He had received acclaim throughout Europe for his dioramas on Scandinavian folk art and vernacular life at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878. The popularity of these approaches at Skansen and places that followed in Denmark, France, and across the continent reflects the widespread concern regarding threats to agrarian culture and its association with a new national consciousness. After Scottish ethnographer Isabel Grant (1887-1983) toured historical parks in Sweden and Norway in the 1920s, she established the first open-air museum in Great Britain—Scotland’s Highland Folk Museum in 1935 on the Isle of Iona, which was relocated four years later to Laggan, Badenoch in the central Highlands.

Brinton wrote enthusiastically about the remarkable ethnographic contributions of Hazelius and others who had founded Skansen and Bygdøy, and told American audiences how the Europeans had “transported bodily” medieval structures from remote countryside locations to similar public settings. “Rooms were re-erected and furnished precisely as they were in bygone days,” he marveled, “and the incidental decorative and domestic arts, such as wood-carving, iron work, pottery, and weaving, found place in the broad scheme. The color notes of which were contributed by the bright red, clear green, dauntless yellow, or discreet white and black of native dress.” Brinton noted the cultural value in handicrafts and rural custom and judged open air museums to be a “great movement toward self-discovery” that involved fine art. The efforts of Brinton and others on both sides of the Atlantic also revived traditional festivals and folk music and led to the organization of cultural-historical societies and professional study.

Hallingdal “Harvest House” Threshing Barn (c. 1800)
Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo

In the spirit of this unusually creative epoch, rural landscapist and architect Gustaf Ankarcrona (1869-1933) established a home and ensemble of restored farm buildings between 1980 and 1911 in Tällberg, a lakeside farming village in Dalecarlia. The area became a vibrant summer enclave for prominent Swedish artists, writers, and musicians. Anders Zorn undertook a similar project from 1914 until his death in 1920 by moving forty historic structures to his hometown of Mora north of Stockholm. The complex later formed the nucleus of the community’s Gammelgarden (“Old Farm”) Heritage Museum. Its fourteenth-century threshing barn is the oldest structure of its kind in the country and one of Europe’s oldest wooden buildings.

A dozen miles southwest of Kristiana in the rural community of Bærum, artist Erik Werenskiold (1855-1938) established the Fleskum Farm art colony after he and his wife, Maggie, acquired the property in 1885. Although only active in the late 1880s, Fleskum became an influential center for artists like Werenskiold, Harriet Backer (1845-1932), and Frits Thaulow (1847-1906) who had all studied in Germany and in France. Exposure to German Realism and the Barbizon experience influenced their return home to paint en plein air Scandinavian landscapes and scenes of peasant life. They introduced Norwegian art to a fresh naturalism and atmospheric “mood painting” that ventured beyond objective reality by imparting artists’ personal feelings. Notable Fleskum works include Backer’s Farm Interior, Skotta in Bærum (1887) and Thaulow’s harvest scene, The Field at Froen (c. 1889).

Swedish Symbolist poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864-1931), raised on a small Dalecarlian farm near the village of Karlbo (origin of his self-designated surname), served as librarian at the Academy of Agriculture from 1903-1912 and published six volumes of poetry between 1895 and 1927. His lyrical verse relates the ancient harmony of peasant life with the earth and rhythm of the seasons. Often speaking through his country gentleman alter-ego Fridolin, Karlfelt’s poems range from exhilarating to somber and flavored with numerous idiomatic allusions that challenge translation about harvest, planting, and other field labors.

…Fridolin dances free, — / Your son, and a brave lad he;
He can talk in the peasant style with a churl, / And in Latin to men of degree.
His scythe goes sharp through the harvest’s gold, / He is proud of the store that his granaries hold,
Toward the moon’s red saucepan he tosses his girl / Like a man of your stalwart mould.

As intermediary between Karlfeldt’s formal “Latin” schooling and threatened “peasant style” talk, Fridolin combines botanical science and religious stories with farmstead lore and echoes from Scandinavia’s pagan past. Karlfeldt’s Fridolin’s visor (Fridolin’s Songs, 1898) expresses hope for cultural understandings informed by the rich legacy of rural wisdom in the wake of unprecedented modernization and depopulation of the countryside. In the collection’s “Song After Harvest,” Fridolin’s “murmuring” is “filled with memory. “Song of Parting” invokes the image of a grain sieve to symbolize the prospect of an approaching storm’s separation of family from surroundings as if the approaching new century threatened a cherished old order.

Karlfeldt continued these musings in Fridolins lustgård (Fridolin’s Garden, 1901) with lines that soar with hope and sometimes fall to despair in the same poem. Finally, “In Fridolin’s Footsteps,” a selection from Flora och Bellona (1918), Karlfeldt laments his longtime imaginary companion’s “ravaged garden” and “forgotten song.” Fridolin speaks no more. The “mourning music” and “ghost of joy” presage Karlfeldt’s personal struggles over family relationships and war on the continent. For his remarkable corpus of poetry and prose, Karlfeldt was posthumously awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1935.

Swallowtail Butterfly on Thistle
National Colonial Farm; Accokeek, Maryland

Plenty is Revealed, Beautiful Upon the Earth

Harvesting Heritage Grain Plots with Family “Volunteers”

We’ve had great fun here at the farm watching family members tend the heritage grain plot trials near the old farmhouse which allows us to determine which grains adapt well to our part of the country. Among the varieties we have grown are White and Red Lammas wheats that owe their enduring folk name to medieval Anglo-Saxon Lammastide (Anglo-Saxon hlaf-mas, “Loaf Mass”) of offerings traditionally held in early August when priests blessed the first ripe wheat. This annual commemoration’s antecedent included the sober rites of Celtic Luhgúhnadh, or the Celtic Sun god “Lugh’s Assembly,” which took place on August 1, when Scottish Gaelic Lùnastal (Welsh Gwl Awst—the Feast of August) was also observed.

In ancient Celtic folklore, Lugh established the festival to honor his foster mother, Talantiu, the “Great One of the Earth,” for dying from exhaustion after clearing forest for land to cultivate. By the early Middle Ages the festival came to include tribal assemblies attended by the High King, sporting contests, trade fairs, and other special events. The modern English word “earth” attests to these early peoples’ sacred regard for the land since the term is derived from Hertha, the Celtic goddess of the soil. (The word “harvest” is from Old English hærfest—“autumn,” the time described by the tenth century Menologium as “…[W]ela byð geywed fægere on foldan, or when “Plenty is revealed,  beautiful upon the earth.”)

Harvest Home in Sandomir (Poland)

Jozef Lienkowicz, Les Costumes du Peuple Polonais (Leipzig, 1841)

Columbia Heritage Collection

Early religious groups adapted these gatherings and vocabulary to the changing conditions of early medieval life and the new faith. Linguists trace the word “bread” (Nordic brøt) to Proto-Indo-European bhreu of northern Europe, a word suggesting the bubbling of leavened bread, the boiling of broth, and the brewing of beer. This northern term implies a process, while Mediterranean Latin’s word for loaf, panis (and derivatives French pain, Italian pane) emphasizes the end product. Medieval harvest festivals were commonly held throughout Europe for several days in late summer or fall depending on local traditions and after the crops had been substantially gathered. Folks of all ages but young people in particular looked forward to these spirited events as a time to don traditional costume, socialize, and engage in amusements after months of toil in the fields. Known in German as Kerbfest or Kirmes (Dutch Kermesse), these joyous times typically featured special church and market fairs with strolling minstrels, fellowship and feasting with family and friends and plenty of drink, and evening dances. The revelry is colorfully and sometimes comically depicted in such paintings as Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574) by Lucas van Valckenborch (1535-1597), Village Feast (c. 1600) by Marten van Cleve (c. 1527-1581), Brueghel’s The Kermesse of St. George (1628), and David Teniers the Younger’s Peasant Kermis (c. 1665).

Lucas van Valckenborch, Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574)

Oil on panel, 14 ½ inches

Danish National Gallery, Copenhagen

The beautifully composed painting Harvest Festival Procession (1826) by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) presents a romanticized view of such an occasion in the German countryside with elements that combine classical and medieval motifs with the artist’s Christian worldview. A celebratory peasant throng bearing grain sheaves follow a raised eagle standard as if a Roman legion marching toward a towering statue of Ceres. Other harvesters continue to labor in a distant field beneath the ruins of a medieval castle. Schinkel’s symbolic works characteristically depict historical and topographical detail in reverence to great epochs through the ages meant to inspire contemporary social renewal.

The painting presents the view of a people who appreciate the sacred bounty of the land which is used to uplift individual spirit and elevate overall area culture.  In many Catholic parishes the church consecration day that commemorated the founding of the church or its patron saint came to added sacred elements to the festival’s old folk traditions—often condemned by clerics, but did not greatly displace them in many areas. Catholic services commemorated the transmission of supernatural power upon a place of worship and featured a lengthy liturgical Mass with Holy Communion of wine and white bread. Protestant Kirchwiehen also involved solemn ceremony but as a sacred dedication and without the metaphysical connotations.

Gleaners and Mowers, Gavellers and Carters

Although few references to gleaning are found in early medieval farm records or literature, the practice was known to parishioners through sermons and readings from biblical texts like Ruth. Agrarian by-laws after the thirteenth century that regulated peasant manorial obligations provide scant evidence that gleaning in the traditional sense was widely practiced. Virtually all able-bodied villagers worked in harvest and received a share of the crop for meagre although sufficient sustenance, and hordes of migratory workers seasonally roamed throughout Europe to meet area labor shortages during the critical weeks of summer. Until the advent of mechanical reapers and threshers in the nineteenth century, the cutting and binding of sheaves could not be done without some loss of the stalks, and more grain fell by the wayside when the sheaves were set into shocks to facilitate drying and gathering onto wagons. Although barley and oats lacked the level of gluten that made wheat the preferred grain for baking, they still offered the poor important sources of nutrition as flatbreads, soups, and other foods. Oats tended to shatter more easily than wheat when ripened and barley stalks could be more brittle, so both crops may have been gleaned to some extent to supplement villagers’ diets.

Johann Schönsperger, Scything and Reaping (1490)

Johann Schönsperger, Teutscher Kalendar (Munich, 1922)

Since landlords sought to turn out their livestock to forage on harvested stubble fields cleared of shocks, gleaners generally had only a week or two to complete their labor. Landowners zealously guarded the harvest from sheaf-stealers, not an uncommon crime at the time, which led to by-laws specifying limits and qualifications for gleaning in the traditional sense. English royal manor instructions of 1282 permit only those incapable of earning any income to glean: “The young, the old, and those who are decrepit and unable to work….” William Blackstone’s Commentary later explains, “By the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean upon another’s ground after the harvest without being guilty of trespass.”

Well into the present era throughout much of Europe, great bands of contract laborers, including both men and women, were led by the overseer who organized teams of workers as if a military operation. Mowers were usually teens (“lads”) and men who wielded sickles, broadhooks, or long-handled scythes and carried whetstones to keep them razor-sharp throughout the day. (The Proto-Indo-European root of the terms “scythe” and “sickle” is sek, also cognate to schism and sex, means to divide, or cut.) The men were followed by gavellers, often wives of the mowers or younger women, who raked the stalks into rows (gavels) for tying into substantial sheaves, or which were left unbound in rows to be thrown with wooden forks by pitchers into horse-drawn wagons. These were driven by carters to large barns and piled and piled by stackers into enormous heaps to await wintertime threshing by flail or horse “treading.”

The “Cerealization” of Europe

The story of farming is one of usual significance throughout rural America, and certainly to urban consumers year-round, let alone in times like these when stocking grocery store shelves is threatened by pandemics and market dislocations. Self-reliant agriculture had long been practiced by natives peoples in North and South America, and since ancient times in the Eastern Hemisphere. When European immigrants began flocking to the United States in the early 1800s they brought many Old World farming traditions that harken back to practices introduced a thousand years ago. A gradual shift in the early medieval period away from annual and two-year cropping in Europe that exhausted soil fertility led to improved cereal production across the continent. The three-year open field rotation system (German Verzelgung, Russian trekhpol’ye) became widespread during the thirteenth century and increased crop yields from one-half to two-thirds in many parts of central and eastern Europe with heavier soils and higher rainfall than in the south. While variable local geographic conditions allow for only generalizations, the triennial system did begin a widespread continental shift from mixed farming to the production of specific grains on designated fields.

This “cerealization” of Europe was directly related to the era’s population rise and led to the emergence of urban centers and new social classes. Grain yields from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries remained negligible by present standards, however, with wheat averaging some eight to twelve bushels per acre, barley ten to fifteen, and oats fifteen to twenty. (Modern non-irrigated yields are commonly five to six times higher.) England’s medieval standard measure of distance, the furlong, was established at 220 yards, or about how far a team of oxen could make a furrow by pulling a plow before needing to rest. A width of forty-four yards—twenty-two trips down and back, came to represent a full day’s work to define the present acre of 4, 840 square yards.

Pietro de Crescenzi, “Farmers Harvesting Crops, ”Opus Ruralium Commmodorum (1471), Vollbehr Collection, Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress

Field size varied widely depending on local norms of peasant holdings, topography, and soil conditions. The area of a “full holding” varied considerably in early medieval Europe but was generally understood to be the amount of land and livestock necessary to support a three-generation family living under the same roof. The year’s culminating grain harvest served the three imperative needs of sustenance for family and livestock, seed for future crops, and seigneurial tax. Over time conventional units of area (English “hide,” German Hufe, French mansus) came to be associated with obligations to seigneur and state, though definitions reflect considerable stratification among villagers. In central Europe, for example, a prosperous Austrian peasant head of household with both full holding and a tenancy might have a hundred acres, while similar status in Bohemia represented sixty acres, but half that area in England and Hungary. Subdividing over generations led to numerous fractional holdings, cotters with only a house and garden, and large numbers of landless laborers.

Gleaning’s Early Modern Revival

Through arrangements with the US Department of Agriculture made possible by my friend and fellow historian Alex McGregor of Colfax’s The McGregor Company, I was recently able to visit Washington, D. C. and document works of agrarian art in our national collections. Among many highlights was seeing the gritty paintings of 1930’s New Deal artists like Ben Shahn as well as classical European works. Among the most beautiful were paintings on exhibit in the National Gallery by Jean-Antoine Watteau who turned to prevailing art academy representations that emphasized the human form of workers rather than the conditions of their lives. Rembrandt van Rinj, Nicholas Poussin, and Bernard Fabritius also rendered the biblical story of Ruth and Boaz in exotic settings and costume with a sacred gravity far removed from the period’s gritty realities in rural Europe. Not until Enlightenment attitudes supplanted aristocratic sentiment were peasants more fully reintegrated with aspirations of the rising middle class through art and literature consistent with era’s ideals of fraternity, progress, and rights of the common man. Enlightenment literary attention to gleaning is also notable for its association with feminine aspects of harvest and the state’s professed benevolent concern for the destitute.

USDA Whitten Building Entry Court; Washington, D. C.

Studies of customs and laws on gleaning challenge conventional interpretations that conflict over the poor’s harvest share arose with the emerging market economies of early modern Europe. But very few and obscure references to gleaning are found the late Roman period with the term virtually unknown in documents from the sixth century AD for the next six hundred years. References to the practice that emerge again in twelfth century English and French village by-laws regulate compensation of workers, describe limits to gleaning in village commons typically reserved as pasture, and are not explicitly associated with the poor. The raking of stalks missed by wielders of sickle and scythe had likely become one of the several steps embedded in the typical harvest cycle in which all able-bodied workers participated. 

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Ceres (c. 1718); Commissioned for Pierre Crozat’s Paris Palazzo, oil on canvas, 55 ¾ x 45 ½ inches; Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

The dominant narrative has held that as private ownership of land and the enclosure movement weakened villagers’ traditional communal rights and the aristocratic great estates, capitalistic demands for productivity eroded moral commitments to the impoverished. But gleaning had become conventional harvest practice and had long since lost its distinct association with the indigent. Population increase since the seventeenth century and the growth of Europe’s cities created substantial numbers of landless poor. Rather than addressing the new realities with comprehensive interventions for public welfare, state officials variously enacted archaic gleaning laws that fomented conflict in the countryside instead of ameliorating needs of the dispossessed. Church leaders often invoked religious rhetoric to justify such government efforts by attempting to apply ancient Levitical imperatives and the story of Ruth to distinctly new economic realities emerging in Western Europe.

Golden Age Artists

Artistic expression of agrarian experience over the centuries has varied like the seasons. Medieval fatalism shown in the solitary religious renderings of agrarian toil gave way to the colorful renderings of joyful communal harvest and other farming endeavor. Greater appreciation of peasant ways emerged during the Renaissance was reflected in new styles of art and literature. The lavish sixteenth century canvases and detailed drawings of Brueghel and his popular imitators show lively scenes with mowers, binders, gleaners, and carters working concurrently. The division of tasks would have normally been done in a sequence, but the scene allows the artist to more naturally depict peasants as real persons who frolic and dine as well as reap and rake. As if storytelling through paint, Brueghel and his successors show workers again proliferating throughout the countryside as had been the case prior to the calamitous fourteenth century of plague and want.

Considerations of more favorable peasant experience through the harvest motif diminish, however, in seventeenth century European art and literature. The German peasant revolts and regional wars across Europe unleashed after the Reformation—often shown as menacing depictions of workers with upraised sickles and scythes, led genteel patrons of the arts to commission calmer representations of country life. The peasantry had become a force to be reckoned with, or at least redirected in energy in order to advance social tranquility and stability. Art that engendered public order and upper class privilege rather than cultural angst led to serenely bucolic works notable for the peculiar absence of rural residents. Yet without these laborers tending the very herds and fields shown in such paintings, no bounty would sustain the population.

John Constable, after Jacob Ruisdael (1648), The Wheatfield (1818); Print Collectors Quarterly 7:2 (February, 1917)

Harvest time canvases by Dutch Golden Age master Peter Paul Rubens often show more livestock than people, while some Jacob van Ruisdael’s paintings and drawings like The Wheatfield (1648)—meticulously studied and copied by John Constable, depict bountiful fields tended by unseen hands. In van Ruisdael’s somber View of the Grainfields (c. 1670), the view is illumined by moonlight, a hint of hope in an otherwise shadowy landscape, with a distant cathedral hinting at reliance upon divine grace. The appearance of landscapes and certain plants and creatures might well foster artist intentions to inspire and illuminate. To be sure, Calvinist sermons heard by Dutch Masters may well have influenced their worldviews. But there is much to suggest from studying primary documents, period literature, and the paintings themselves that artists and those who first viewed their works saw real and imagined landscapes as sources of natural beauty and love as much as reflections for spiritual edification.