The Hay Harvesters

Harvesting scenes were popular themes in paintings of farm work in the 19th century. The portrayal of women and men working on fields in beautiful landscapes provided artists with a variety of motifs and interpretations: religious gratefulness, happiness due to good crops, hard work, muscular bodies, clothes and rituals in folkloric scenes, and finally the sharing of the harvest with the poor by allowing them to glean.

Together with Millet, Breton and Lhermitte, Julien Dupré was an adherent of this genre of painting. He was born in Paris in 1851 as the son of a jeweler. He received his most influential training as a painter from his fellow-countryman Désiré François Laugée (1823– 1896) and later married Laugée’s daughter. He created a considerable number of paintings with farming themes, many of them part of major museum collections the world over.

This painting is a companion to The Hay Harvest (also in the Grohmann Museum collection) and could be another version of the same scene. A woman wearing clothes with the national colors of France (red, white and blue) picks up a pile of hay with her pitchfork while two other workers to her left also pick up hay with fork and bare hands. The ox-drawn hay wagon stands to the rear with a worker stacking the wagon. Other harvesters work in the background.