Brueghel’s Renaissance Beauty and Blisters (Part I)

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s sixteenth century masterpiece The Harvesters (1565) provides vivid commentary on the Old World division of labor. The vibrant panorama is one of five in the acclaimed Renaissance artist’s ambitious Seasons series of wide, high diagonal foregrounds that allow viewers to perceive vast distances. The work teems with life and hot summer harvest bounty likely set in “Peasant Brueghel’s” native northern Brabant district of central Belgium. A group of men wield scythes in a dense stand of wheat almost as high as they stand, followed by women who pile the stalks into sheaves which some carry toward a clearing. In the distance a team of oxen pulls a wagon piled high with grain to the farmstead to await threshing. The field’s proximity to a church suggests these communal endeavors are hallowed tasks, while field hands also cluster in the shade of pear tree to rest, frolic, and eat bread and porridge. The grand work is also an allegorical depiction of Proverbs 10:5—“He who gathers in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who brings shame.” Flemish threshers also banded together by the thousands in this time to cross the Channel and work the later English harvest. They brought their folksongs with them, including one derived from a Medieval Latin hymn with a cadence guided by the swinging of their scythes. The tune’s doggerel verses were retranslated again by English hearers as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565)
Oil on wood, 45⅞ x 62⅞ inches
Rogers Fund, Metropolitan Art Museum, New York; Wikimedia Commons

Brueghel (1525-1569) began his career as an engraver, and his landscape Rustic Efforts (Solicitudo Rustica) shows the influence of his earlier travels to Italy in 1552-1553. Before this time, Brueghel, like most other artists of the age, used landscapes as backdrops for religious figures or other representations. The idea of depicting grand open spaces for their own sake stimulated uneasy prospects in the minds of viewers accustomed to perceiving wilderness and grand vistas as fearsome. While Petrarch’s idea of ascending a mountain simply for “the view” largely remained a radical notion in the sixteenth century, Brueghel’s art humanized such perspectives in ways that marked the emergence of a new approach that would popularize landscapes. Rustic Efforts—sometimes translated Country Concerns, presents a grand agrarian vista of Flemish vitality that directs the viewer from two harvesters in the lower right-hand corner upwards to a primal forest far in the distance, and across waterways teeming with trading vessels to steeply thrusting mountains on the left side. Between the scythers and the mountains is a broad verdant plain with a universe of tiny villages, a gristmill and churches, and farm workers and livestock who share the fields with the Brueghel’s puffy trees. One’s eyes return to the two harvesters, one of whom is pounding his scythe on a small anvil, who might well be thinking with pride, “We make all this possible.”

Known for realism in a day of artistic formalism, Brueghel offers a faithful if restrained record of agrarian life in its many manifestations—joy and fatigue, beauty and blisters, to impart the sense that peasants were ciphers for timeless humanity. Among his revolutionary artistic innovations is the sympathetic portrayal of ordinary people with all their foibles and prosaic chores amidst backdrops of natural grandeur.

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.