Bruegel The Harvesters

The Harvesters, painted with oil on wood in 1565 by Peter Bruegel the Elder, portrays a scenic harvesting and the people who are participating in it. The painting was part of a series of six, meant to display the seasons of the year and was commissioned by a merchant in Antwerp for his own personal collection. The Harvesters has a civic intention, being a part of a community, and uses artistic detail to create scenery a person can identify with and become a part of. Studying the painting helps identify the subtle detail that strengthen an argument for the civic purpose of the painting. To begin the analysis, there appears to be two separate portions of the piece divided by a line created through the use of trees and a hill based landscape. There is a viewpoint on the right that is closer to the viewer, with the actual harvesters
The persons displayed on the right hand are both working and resting, portraying what agricultural work may have been like during this time period and location. The artist uses a tree to draw the eye down to the group of people resting and sharing a meal next to the field. The artist wanting to draw the eye of the viewer to the group could mean that this is what he wanted the focus/subject of the painting to be. There are several examples of how he used the color of the tree line, green, and the color of the wheat, yellow, to distinguish a shift between the upper and lower portion of the right side, with the brown bark of the tree being the object that runs through both that ties these two sections together. In the background, behind the dark bush line, there is what clearly appears to be a church, bring a sort of religious present’s common to the Renaissance period. And then after all of this analysis of the background on the right half of the painting, there are now the figures located in front of the bush line to discuss and how they reflect on the civic engagement of the