Slide 16 of 26
Notes:
Panel, 1565, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Breugel often represented eating of food with harvesting scenes, that is he linked the consumption of food with its production.
This well-known painting called the corn harvest, may seem odd to anyone with an agricultural background. The crop being harvested looks more
like wheat than corn; the misuse of the term in English can be traced to the translation of the German word Korn which is one word for grain (another would be Getreide).
This is the fourth surviving panel from the series of the Months commissioned by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jonghelinck. Once again, Buregel’s composition is made up of a harmonious combination of figures and landscape, showing human preoccupations set against a background of nature and religious faith (represented by the church on the right). Human activity is made to seem peripheral by the strong evocation of the mood of the landscape.
