Golden Age Artists

Artistic expression of agrarian experience over the centuries has varied like the seasons. Medieval fatalism shown in the solitary religious renderings of agrarian toil gave way to the colorful renderings of joyful communal harvest and other farming endeavor. Greater appreciation of peasant ways emerged during the Renaissance was reflected in new styles of art and literature. The lavish sixteenth century canvases and detailed drawings of Brueghel and his popular imitators show lively scenes with mowers, binders, gleaners, and carters working concurrently. The division of tasks would have normally been done in a sequence, but the scene allows the artist to more naturally depict peasants as real persons who frolic and dine as well as reap and rake. As if storytelling through paint, Brueghel and his successors show workers again proliferating throughout the countryside as had been the case prior to the calamitous fourteenth century of plague and want.

Considerations of more favorable peasant experience through the harvest motif diminish, however, in seventeenth century European art and literature. The German peasant revolts and regional wars across Europe unleashed after the Reformation—often shown as menacing depictions of workers with upraised sickles and scythes, led genteel patrons of the arts to commission calmer representations of country life. The peasantry had become a force to be reckoned with, or at least redirected in energy in order to advance social tranquility and stability. Art that engendered public order and upper class privilege rather than cultural angst led to serenely bucolic works notable for the peculiar absence of rural residents. Yet without these laborers tending the very herds and fields shown in such paintings, no bounty would sustain the population.

John Constable, after Jacob Ruisdael (1648), The Wheatfield (1818); Print Collectors Quarterly 7:2 (February, 1917)

Harvest time canvases by Dutch Golden Age master Peter Paul Rubens often show more livestock than people, while some Jacob van Ruisdael’s paintings and drawings like The Wheatfield (1648)—meticulously studied and copied by John Constable, depict bountiful fields tended by unseen hands. In van Ruisdael’s somber View of the Grainfields (c. 1670), the view is illumined by moonlight, a hint of hope in an otherwise shadowy landscape, with a distant cathedral hinting at reliance upon divine grace. The appearance of landscapes and certain plants and creatures might well foster artist intentions to inspire and illuminate. To be sure, Calvinist sermons heard by Dutch Masters may well have influenced their worldviews. But there is much to suggest from studying primary documents, period literature, and the paintings themselves that artists and those who first viewed their works saw real and imagined landscapes as sources of natural beauty and love as much as reflections for spiritual edification.

The Abiding Significance of Agrarian Art

On numerous occasions in recent months I’ve been reminded how by the names of notable humanitarian groups like Second Harvest and Food for the Hungry that “gleaning” remains a highly relevant endeavor for our time. Although often associated with bygone days, gleaning has never been more relevant in this day when so much food goes to waste while hunger still stalks substantial numbers of the population. Hats off to the many dedicated workers in these organizations who devote themselves to collecting excess produce, and to farmers across the country who partner with these groups to provide these valuable commodities.

2nd Harvest Delivery Truck Trailer Mural (2018); Pasco, Washington

Universal themes of deliverance from want through rural toil and fellowship have been variously represented throughout history through images of reaping and gleaning in art and literature. The Bible and ancient writings by Homer and Virgil include numerous references to sickle and sheaf, which are also graphically depicted in Egyptian tomb paintings and Near Eastern mosaics. Representations of them continued to appear in stirring, numinous form for the next two millennia. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Valley of the Arno (1473), which shows distant Florentine fields from a mountain slope vantage, is considered the first landscape done for nature’s sake, though evidence of humanity’s presence is limited in Leonardo’s drawing to distant stone ramparts and partitioned fields.

But development of landscape as an artistic and literary theme was slow to develop in Europe and only in the mid-1500s do graphic works by Titian, Domenico Campagnola, and other Italian masters appear as idealistic countrysides with human figures to enliven such subjects. Images of scythe-wielding harvesters first appear in Late Roman Era sculpture and wall decoration, and as illustrations for religious works in the Early Middle Ages.

Lodewijk Toeput, Summer Harvest (c. 1590), National Archives

Sixteenth century Flemish painters and printmakers Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Lodewijk Toeput were among the first artists to depict harvest scenes. Such masterpieces as Brueghel’s celebrated The Harvesters (1565) significantly contributed to the validity of agrarian landscape as a prominent theme for painting and drawing. Farmer-poet Thomas Tusser, Brueghel’s English contemporary, composed A Hundreth Good Pointes of Good Husbandrie, first printed in London in 1557, to express the country year in rhyming couplets for a long poem that contributed to agrarian literature as an accepted genre.  In every country, as with most every artist and author, the function of art as expression of meaning and beauty is different and changes in manifold ways over time.

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 5)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.

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Home, Church, School

Our mother was an avid reader and may have been among the few 1960s Book-of-the-Month farm wives in the vicinity which provided us with early access Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, Catherine the Great’s Memoirs, and other beautifully illustrated and bound volumes. Thanks to Mr. Yenny, our formidable school principal and eighth grade teacher, more thorough study of Grandpa’s poets came our way with agrarian relevance. We read every word of Longfellow’s Evangeline aloud in class, and my hexametric memories of “Acadie” remained evermore vivid not only because the heroine’s evocative if peculiar name was the same as my maternal grandmother’s middle name, but because the epic made recurrent reference to words familiar to our rural experience. In just the opening lines we met “goodly acres,” “harvest heat,” and “reapers at noontide.”   

Hans Franke (1935), Harvest Scene (detail)

Apart from a large mirror and family pictures on our living room walls, our home had little in terms of framed decor. But lack of popular country scenes by Millet or Brueghel did not limit the colorful and meaningful existence of a threatened agrarian lifeway. We were immersed in it. The “Northwest Drylands” popularized on calendars and canvas a generation later by photographer John Clement surrounded us in every direction. I enjoyed periodic visits to the home of an elderly relative and storyteller, Clara Schmick Litzenberger, not only to listen to tales passed down about Old Country living but also because of her wide-ranging interests in music and art. The copy of a large harvest time painting hung in her living room that, except for the distant woodlands, could have been of fields surrounding nearby Steptoe Butte. The artist was an obscure German, Hans Franke, and I learned many years after Clara’s passing that he favored scenes in the very vicinity of our ancestral Hessen homeland. We did not know the place existed back then, but my boyhood interest in these topics must have evidenced some indication of kindred spirit. Upon her passing in 1979, I learned that Clara had willed the painting to me. 

Edwin Molander, Grain Sheaf Window Panel (1949), Trinity Lutheran Church, Endicott, Washington

Dad also kept a 1930s English translation of the German Ohio Lutheran Synod’s Gebets-Shatz, or Treasure of Prayers—probably a confirmation gift, with a “Harvest Festival Prayer” that reminded listeners of forces beyond mortal control known to farming folk: “O Give thanks to the Lord; for He is good; because His mercy and truth endure forever…. O, how we took we feared the destruction of the precious grain in the fields! O, how we took thought and troubled ourselves, lest the bread which God has yet given us… might be snatched away. Thou has given us the early and the later rain in due season, and has faithfully and annually protected our harvests.” Confirmands in my day were customarily presented a similar small volume containing a “For Fields and Crops” prayer: “…Teach me, dear Lord, to know that Thou dost supply, in due season, daily bread for us and all mankind. Give us the needed diligence and necessary skill in the sowing and gathering of our harvests. Protect our fields from hail, fire, and floods, and let the earth yield its increase. Make us a thankful people as we enjoy working amid growing things, and open our eyes to behold the beauty of Thy creation.”