Reapers

Reapers from 1785 by George Stubbs depicts harvest workers in the fields, part of his series of rural labor subjects. These paintings documented the agricultural workforce that sustained Britain's landed economy. Stubbs's oil technique was grounded in exhaustive anatomical study—he spent eighteen months dissecting horses at a Lincolnshire farmhouse before painting the plates for his Anatomy of the Horse (1766)—producing an exactitude of musculature and bone structure unmatched in equestrian art.

The harvest scene combines figure painting with landscape, the reapers' labor depicted with the careful observation Stubbs brought to all his subjects.