The grain harvest

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The grain harvest (Pieter Bruegel the Elder)
The grain harvest
Pieter Bruegel the Elder , 1565
oil on wood
119 × 162 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York City

The Grain Harvest is a painting in oil on wood by Pieter Bruegel the Elder . The 119 × 162 cm picture was created in 1565 as one of six seasonal pictures, five of which have survived. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York .

Image description

A slender pear tree divides the picture in the ratio of the golden section into a larger left and a smaller right part. The left side is dominated by the extensive cornfields that extend from the foreground over a gently sloping slope to the middle distance. In the foreground, an exhausted field worker is stretched out in the shade of the tree, next to it are already cut sheaves that have been mowed with scythes by two other harvest workers . A man, heavily loaded with full jugs, comes up a path cut through the field, while three other figures, some with sheaves of corn on their shoulders, are on the way down to the village in the middle distance. A wagon with a draft animal heavily loaded with the harvest is also on the way to where a hustle and bustle can be seen at the intersection between some houses. In the background, under a hazy gray sky, another hill with cornfields as well as a coastal town and a gently curved bay with a few ships stand out.

On the narrower right side, eight figures are grouped around a white cloth in the shade of the tree. They sit on sheaves that have already been tied and eat lunch made up of porridge or soup and bread; one figure drinks from a jug, another cuts a slice from the loaf of bread that is in a basket next to the group. Behind them you can see a mown cornfield, on the left side of which a male and a female figure tie the sheaves in bundles and set them up to dry, while a worker is cutting more corn next to it. This work is already done on the right edge of the picture. Behind it, two other figures are busy collecting windfalls in a basket, and a ladder is also waiting. The background is largely covered by the foliage of bushes and trees, but gentle, grainy hills, a church tower and house roofs can be made out. In the lower right corner of the picture the painting is signed "BRVEGEL / [MD] LXV".

Classification and reception

The grain harvest has the same format as the four other surviving pictures of the season cycle and was probably painted for the same client. Each painting covers two months of the year. Assuming that the gloomy day stands for the carnival month of February and for March and that the spring image is lost, then the grain harvest represents the harvest month of August and September.

Sleeper under the tree in the painting Das Schlaraffenland .

Like the other four pictures, The Grain Harvest has a predominant color or color combination, namely “the yellow of the ready-to-cut grain.” In The Grain Harvest “the dancing people are missing from the hay harvest” . The workers take a break from their hard work in the summer heat or strengthen themselves with a meal in the shade. Bruegel used the "motif [s] of the sleeper under the tree [...] two years later again in the image of the land of milk and honey."

In the description of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the cycle of the seasons is recognized as the "watershed in the history of Western art"; Bruegel no longer needs a religious pretext for landscape painting, but uses his in-depth knowledge of the compositional principles of the Italian Renaissance to present an unadorned view of country life.

For Birgit Kersten, the painting is a mirror of the prosperity of the Netherlands occupied by the Spanish , before the rebellion under the harsh regime of the Duke of Alba . Kersten points out the paramount importance of grain for the nutrition of the people at that time as well as the catastrophic consequences of bad harvests. Bruegel is obviously not concerned with the representation of individual people (the figures in the picture are often depicted with their faces turned away or with little detailed facial features), "but probably more about people during their work in nature."

Provenance

Many of the later owners of the grain harvest were important patrons, for example Leopold Wilhelm of Austria , shown in his gallery in Brussels in the painting by David Teniers .

Like the other seasons, the grain harvest in 1566 belonged to Nicolaes Jonghelinck in Antwerp , then to Hane von Wijke (also Antwerp), who sold it to the city council of Antwerp in 1594 for 1,400 guilders so that it was a gift to Archduke Ernst of Austria , the governor of the Netherlands could be made. In the inventory of his estate from 1595, the pictures appear as the numbers 7 to 12 with the description “Six Taffell, from 12 months of the hen of the Jars von Bruegel”. The pictures then passed into the possession of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and after his death in 1612 they went to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (like Archduke Ernst Stadtholder of the Netherlands). In his inventory from 1659, however, there is only mention of “ five large pieces of a large one, was in the times of the year from Öhlfarb to Holcz […] original from old Brögel.” Leopold Wilhelm died in 1662, whereupon Emperor Leopold I received the pictures. They became part of the imperial collection in Vienna . From there, the pictures sometimes went their separate ways. In 1809, the grain harvest went to Count Antoine-François Andréossy , the French governor of Vienna, who took the painting to Paris and sold it to Jacques Antoine Doucet in 1816 for 90 francs and 11 centimes. The description at the time of sale reads "From a master of the old German school [...] a landscape with great richness of detail, depicting harvesting work [...] length 58 inches, height 44 inches." Paul Jean Cels in Brussels acquired the picture from Doucet before 1912. The Metropolitan Museum of Arts bought the painting from Cels with funds from the estate of Jacob S. Rogers , a locomotive manufacturer who donated most of his fortune to the museum when he died in 1901. When the picture was cleaned in 1920, the signature and parts of the date became visible: "BRVEGEL / [MD] LXV".

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ See Hagen, 1999. p. 64.
  2. ↑ Hagen, 1999. p. 64. In the painting Die Jäger im Schnee , for example, it is white and greenish gray.
  3. ↑ Hagen, 1999. p. 64.
  4. ↑ Kersten, 2010.
  5. ↑ See Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  6. ↑ Kersten, 2010.
  7. ↑ Quoted from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  8. ↑ Quoted from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  9. ↑ Quoted from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Par un maître de l'ancienne École allemande […] Un paysage du plus grand détail, offering les travaux de la moisson […] L. 58 p [ouces]., H. 44 p [ouces]. "
  10. ^ Inge Herold: Pieter Bruegel the Elder: the seasons . Prestel, 2002, ISBN 978-3-7913-2658-0 , pp. 92 .

literature

Web links

Commons : The Grain Harvest  - collection of images, videos and audio files