Summer

Summer, dated 1605 and in the Noordbrabants Museum, is part of the classical tradition of representing the four seasons as agricultural or pastoral scenes that had roots in both classical antiquity and in Flemish painting going back to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's celebrated season series (1565). The summer season offered Brueghel the opportunity to depict harvest activity — the cutting and gathering of grain, haymaking, outdoor peasant labour — within a warm, light-flooded landscape. Such season paintings carried multiple cultural valences: they celebrated agricultural abundance (and by extension, stable governance), they served the calendrical and moral tradition of representing time's passage, and they provided occasions for Brueghel's most ambitious figure-in-landscape compositions. The Noordbrabants Museum holds this work in regional context, 's-Hertogenbosch having been a major Brabantine cultural centre in the Brueghel dynasty's formative milieu.

Oil on panel, the summer palette is characterised by warm golds and yellows of ripened grain, bright greens of foliage at full development, and the warm light of a high-summer sun. Brueghel manages the harvest scene's complex organisation — multiple groups of workers across a wide field — through spatial recession that distributes figures across three depth zones. Individual figures are rendered with enough detail to constitute genre-painting characters within the larger landscape.