This panel is one of a number commissioned to Bruegel by Jongelinck, an Antwerp merchant. The series originally included six works each of them depicting a season of the year (in Netherlandish times the year was divided into six seasons). Five of them - Gloomy Day, The Harvesters, Hunters in the Snow, the Return of the Herd and this one - have survived, the likely loss being a depiction of winter.

Although the church is present in the background it is important to note that Bruegel definitively broke, with this series, the justification for religious landscape painting, an almost obligation in Christian Europe in those days. Each of the paintings in the series shows a new humanism interpreted by Bruegel with the depiction of nature and people going about their most natural daily activities.

Haymaking tells the life of the ordinary peasant in summer in an imaginary landscape that brings back memories of Bruegel's trip to Italy. It is a painting that again shows the genius for narrative that Bruegel introduced in Netherlandish art. 

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