The Harvesters

As director of the Metropolitan Museum, why is this painting so important to you? The Metropolitan has tens of thousands of works of art spanning 5,000 years of human creativity, but I think there are certain key pieces that stand out. The Harvesters is one of those pieces that speaks to everybody. It's a timeless study of man in nature. It's both objective but also deeply sensitive to the reality of life at the time it was painted. When he painted The Harvesters, how did Bruegel accomplish this? One becomes like a pilgrim in Bruegel's paintings. You enter these people's lives, and you travel in this landscape that he's constructed so marvelously. For example, this group we see in the lower right-hand corner is having their lunch break, and there are these amazing details like the pears laid out in front of them that are coming from the tree that you can see just behind them. One figure climbs up into the tree to pick the pears as two figures below, collect them, and probably bring them down to the foreground. How does his composition draw you in? You're never allowed to stop and stay too long in one place. Suddenly you're on that road, down through that narrow path with the women who are carrying these bundles on top of their heads, and there you are joining the caravan there going past the swimming pool. We find these scenes of monks who have stripped down bathing in the pool, of kids playing a game of cock throw, and all of this is shown not with any sense of mockery but with a real participation in the sense of the continuum of life. I love this woman with her cheese on her bread sitting so perfectly upright. We know exactly that person. So what was new about this picture when it was painted in the 16th century? The landscape, it's really the first modern landscape in Western art. Bruegel has inserted a completely coherent middle ground, and it increases both our engagement with the landscape, he puts us into the landscape along with the peasants walking down those paths, and the sense of a measurable distance. One really feels the heat of summer in this picture in a way that nobody had ever felt it, I think, before. When he painted the picture, Bruegel was living in Antwerp. What was that city like in the 16th century? It was really the most important economic center of Western Europe where there was shipping, there was certainly a lot that was going on in terms of the agricultural world and selling not only locally but abroad, and wheat of this type was a very highly prized commodity, you know, the gold of the earth, basically. So who chose the subject of this painting? This obviously was the choice of the patron, Nicholas Jongelink, who was deeply interested in classical literature and wanted something to decorate his villa outside of Antwerp. But why would a wealthy patron want a picture of workers in the field? The framework is set up by the universal love throughout Europe for Bruegel, the classical Roman poet. He celebrates the landscape and celebrates those who work the fields. I think it is a very strong reminder of when man and nature were much closer than they are today. Isn't this the way we all like to imagine the farmers at the green market? That those who are closest to nature are experiencing the truest life. What about Bruegel's technique when he painted the picture? I think that one can look still at this picture very closely and still see the marvelously thin technique, the delicate technique that Bruegel uses. You're practically seeing the white ground despite the fact that all pictures have changed over time. It still holds up and reads in the most marvelous way. Nearly 5 centuries later, do you think the painting still has something to tell us today? I've used this picture on my tours all of last summer and I'm going to use it again this summer. It's fascinating to me that nearly 500 years after it was made, it still speaks to a general public. For me, and I think for many people, it has a very calming effect. It has that sense of realism. We can identify with the summer, the heat, the wheat, playing games, sailing a ship, and I think that's one of the reasons why this picture says so much. So, what is a masterpiece? A masterpiece in painting is very much like a great, great novel. It takes you a place where you haven't been. It gives you insight into various aspects of life. It gives enormous pleasure. John Brealey, who was our paintings conservator, used to have a term for masterpiece. He called it a life changer. A life changer is that you look at this, and from this point on, any time you look at a field of wheat, this is the picture that's going to become the lens through which you see landscape. It's a life changer. It changes the way you see life.