Paintings of 1565
This is one of six panels painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder for the suburban Antwerp home of the wealthy merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, one of the artist’s most enthusiastic patrons—Jongelinck owned no less than sixteen of Bruegel’s works. The series, which represented the seasons or times of the year, included six works, five of which survive. The other four are: The Gloomy Day, The Return of the Herd, Hunters in the Snow (all Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and Haymaking (Lobkowicz Collections, Prague). Through his remarkable sensitivity to nature’s workings, Bruegel created a watershed in the history of Western art, suppressing the religious and iconographic associations of earlier depictions of the seasons in favor of an unidealized vision of landscape. The Harvesters probably represented the months of August and September in the context of the […]
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