Wheat stands high and golden across the middle of the picture, and the workers have stopped to eat. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Harvesters in 1565 as part of a group of paintings of the times of the year, made for the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jonghelinck. Only some of the group survive, and this late-summer scene is one of the best-known.
Bruegel does not make the peasants into heroes or comic figures. A few are still cutting wheat with sickles and tying it into sheaves. Under a pear tree, others have sat down to a meal of bread and a bowl, and one man is stretched out asleep. The heat and the tiredness come across without comment.
The eye is led from this group down a path to the pale yellow field and on to the distant village, the harbor and the sea. The picture holds a whole landscape in one view, and it manages to be both a close study of working life and a wide panorama of the Flemish countryside.
The painting has belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1919. It is often the first Bruegel visitors seek out, and it explains why he is remembered as the painter of peasants and seasons.
Bruegel's The Harvesters appears on our: