Harvest Scene

Before becoming known as a painter, Jules-Jacques Veyrassat gained distinction as a graphic artist, producing etchings after the paintings of artists such as Daubigny, Frère, and Rembrandt. His long career as a landscape and genre painter appears to have been relatively uneventful and was not recorded in detail. Veyrassat traveled widely across France, including to Samois, a picturesque village on the Seine four miles from Fontainebleau, where he established residence.

This work, painted when the artist was at the village of Valvins, is characteristic of Veyrassat in both subject and treatment. Hay is being unloaded from two carts to form haystacks. At the left the grain is being scythed and gathered, and at the right in the background several stacks have been completed. The artist has displayed his adroitness as an animal painter in the rendering of the draft horses and the donkey grazing beside the nearest stack. Also characteristic of Veyrassat is the sense of expanse, created in part by the low horizon, the unusually wide format of the picture, and the foreshortened row of trees receding into the background.