Rural Life
Farming, herding, harvests and village life in art, from medieval calendars to 19th-century peasant painting and folk memory.
6 works · 10 related artists
About
Farming and village life have been pictured since the Middle Ages, first as part of the cycle of the year. The Limbourg brothers' Très Riches Heures (c. 1412–16) shows peasants ploughing, shearing and warming themselves by the fire beneath their lord's castles. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Harvesters (1565) gives a midday meal in a wheat field the sweep of a panorama.
Industrialisation made the countryside newly precious. John Constable painted the Stour valley of his youth in The Hay Wain (1821), and Jean-François Millet's The Gleaners (1857) showed three women stooping for leftover grain, which some Parisian critics read as a political provocation. Jules Breton's The Song of the Lark (1884) catches a barefoot field worker pausing at sunrise. In the 20th century Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, began painting in her late seventies, filling pictures with remembered harvests, maple sugaring and snowy farmyards.
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