A Summer Landscape with Harvesters

In a glorious, earthy depiction of humanity and nature, peasants labor in the fields, relax with a picnic, and flirt in a vast, panoramic landscape of rolling fields that give way to a distant valley and ultimately the faraway sea. Possibly part of a series of paintings showing labors appropriate to the different months or seasons, A Summer Landscape with Harvesters is the largest and most spectacular of Joos de Momper’s many harvest scenes.

Based on a similar composition by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York), the painting is a collaboration between De Momper and Pieter Bruegel’s son, Jan Brueghel. De Momper, who was one of the most prominent Flemish landscape painters of the late 1500s and early 1600s, often worked with other painters who would add figures, animals, and birds to his landscapes. Jan Brueghel was a frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens and a successful artist in his own right (see his Landscape with a Fishing Village in Gallery 23).