The Harvesters, 1565 (Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA)

The four seasons are often a subject treasured by artists. Bruegel depicts here a moment of hard work but also reward in the life of the peasant. He often made use of the diagonal technique for creating dramatic landscapes that fall into one another and unfold in the distance. Few of his paintings are as dramatic as this with people eating and resting in the foreground, a mother nursing the child, the stacks of hay drying in the sun, peasants working the field and women walking back and forth to the animated village in the background . You can imagine the time of the year to be late June, harvesting time, when the fields assume the calm, peaceful yellowish colour of mature hay and the sun illuminates forests and fields.

With this painting Bruegel moralizes on life, its difficulties but also rest following a hard day’s work. The church, almost omnipresent in Bruegel's  work but here unlikely placed in the middle of the forest, is a reminder to viewers that God looks upon them at all times. 

Note the typical Low Countries landscape in the very background on the left; a subject that will be taken up in countless Dutch and Flemish paintings in the following centuries.

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