The Harvesters 1565 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
2 Video Views·Mar 21, 2026
It’s a hot, dry summer and the harvest is in full swing; workers take a break for beer, bread and cheese; a man lies stretched out under the pear tree, mid-snore. And that’s just the foreground: in the background, apple-scrumping, wild swimming, village revels and some "very joyful buttocks"! (Picture from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)
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If they were seasonal workers, they would start already at four or five o'clock in the morning
when it's getting a little bit light outside and they would be working until nine o'clock in the
evening, maybe even ten o'clock in the evening. So it's day after day, long hours of work and
they do look tired. Behind the lunch group, a man in a red doublet nails on a sheaf as he binds it.
A woman bends almost double to bring another bundle together. Her forehead rests on the weed,
her arms stretched to surround it. If you are working and you are in the moment, you do not
think of time and space anymore and you can imagine a dancer from a very top ballet or dance group
performing like this so fluently that you think it must be easy and that's a very idyllic view
on the bucolic and on the traditional rural life too. Follow the path down the hill past the man
bringing more beer to the workers. Do you see the three women? The first two carry sheaves of weed.
The third is empty-handed. Her face is in profile. I feel like you can tell that she's thinking about
something. She's looking down but you get a sense that she's a real person and it's almost like a
mini portrait in the center of the painting and you wouldn't necessarily notice her.
When you stand in front of the painting at the Met, there's no way you could get this close.
I mean the guards will yell at you if you get anywhere near that close. Follow the slope of
the wheat field down to the bottom of the valley. There's a tiny pond in the cool green shade of the
trees. Not everyone's working today. He is depicting the different stages of group of monks
getting into the water. So firstly we see one of them. He is fully clad so it seems.
And we see somebody into the water full bottom up. Little buttocks. They look very joyful. I can't
quite figure out why. Monks mind. Very joyful about those buttocks. The wonderful thing about
Bruegel is that the more you look at it the more you find there's no area that isn't thought about
even the background is treated like foreground.