Christopher Noey: As director of the Metropolitan Museum,
why is this painting so important to you?
Thomas P. Campbell: 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 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.
Christopher Noey: When he painted The Harvesters,
how did Bruegel accomplish this?
Ryan Wong: 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.
Christopher Noey: How does his composition draw you in?
Maryan Ainsworth: 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 the
top of their heads, and there you are joining the caravan there,
going past the swimming pool.
Keith Christiansen: 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 and 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.
Christopher Noey: So what was new about this picture when it
was painted in the sixteenth century?
Keith Christiansen: It’s a landscape that’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
measureable distance, and one really feels the heat of summer
in this picture in a way that nobody had ever felt it, I think, before.
Christopher Noey: When he painted the picture, Bruegel was
living in Antwerp. What was that city like in the sixteenth century?
Maryan Ainsworth: It was really the most important economic center
of Western Europe. There was shipping, there certainly was 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.
Christopher Noey: So who chose the subject of this painting?
Keith Christiansen: This obviously was the choice of the patron,
Nicholas Jonghelinck, who was deeply interested in classical
literature and wanted something to decorate his villa outside of Antwerp.
Christopher Noey: But why would a wealthy patron want a
picture of workers in the field?
Keith Christiansen: The framework is set up by the universal
love throughout Europe for Virgil.
Christopher Noey: The classical Roman poet.
Keith Christiansen: 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 that are closest to nature are
experiencing the truest life.
Christopher Noey: What about Bruegel’s technique when he painted the picture?
Dorothy Mahon: 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.
Christopher Noey: Nearly five centuries later, do you think the
painting still has something to tell us today?
Ryan Wong: I’ve used this picture on my tours all of last summer,
and I’m going to use it again this summer, and it’s fascinating
to me that nearly 500 years after it was made,
it still speaks to a general public.
Dorothy Mahon: For me, and I think for many people it has a very
calming effect, 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.
Christopher Noey: So what is a masterpiece?
Keith Christiansen: 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, anytime you look at a field of wheat,
this is the picture that is going to become the lens through
which you see landscape.
And it’s a life-changer. It changes the way you see life.