LoginThe Real Country: 5 Threshing and processing grain
Harvested cereal needs to be separated into grain, stems of straw, and miscellaneous fragments such as husk known as chaff. Of these, the grain is the most valuable as it will be ground into flour, a process shown in the next article in this series. Long straw was also a valuable commodity, as it was used extensively for thatching, while the chaff was usually discarded. Separating grain and chaff from straw was accomplished by threshing, one of the first processes in arable farming to be mechanised, while removing the chaff is referred to as winnowing.
In ancient civilisations, threshing was performed by striking the cut crop using flails, as show in this marginal drawing in the Luttrell Psalter from the east of England. This is thought to have been made in about 1325-35, when this tiring and inefficient method was still widespread.
In ancient Egypt, oxen were used, first to trample the grain with their hooves and later to draw a heavy rotating sledge or roller over the cut crop. This was usually performed on a flat and elevated area, where the wind could blow away much of the generated chaff.
Goya’s greatest achievement in his series showing the seasons, and probably the finest of all his cartoons, is that for summer, seen here in his sketch of The Threshing Floor from 1786. Although the huge finished version is more finely detailed, his brushwork there is also surprisingly loose. Two horses used to tow the heavy roller at the far left are here seen at rest, as the labourers relax. They’re holding pitchforks, used to load the threshing floor with cut cereal and gather the straw when the load has been threshed.
In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, a century later, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.
Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, who are drawing a threshing sledge.
While much of the work of harvest remained intensely and exhaustively manual, some processes like the separation of grain seeds from inedible straw proved amenable to mechanisation.
In Franz Niklaus König’s Farmers, around the House;, or Farmer Family in the Barn from 1798, one of the early hand-cranked threshing machines is shown on the right, as the farmer is winnowing clouds of chaff from the grain it produced. Most barns were built with large openings at each end, to allow natural breezes to blow the chaff away and leave the denser grain in the large, shallow wickerwork trays used for winnowing.
By the end of the nineteenth century, animals and other sources of power were being used, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893, with a detail below. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines. The next step was to make those engines mobile under their own power, as traction engines.
Jean-François Millet’s portrait of Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 shows her holding a traditional winnow in her left hand.
Storage was a major consideration, too. Although threshed grain generally keeps well, it’s prone to rodents and must be kept dry. A traditional solution was to build the sheaves of cut cereal into grainstacks, then protect them with a covering of thatch. These are different from the stacks of hay also common in the countryside, and played a major role in Impressionism.
Claude Monet first painted a series of canvases depicting grainstacks at Giverny, literally outside his back yard, in 1889. In the early autumn of 1890, Monet started a fresh series consisting of two grainstacks, now accorded Wildenstein numbers of W1266 to W1279. During that winter, the farmer was able to start threshing, and one of the grainstacks was consumed.
Apparently Monet paid the farmer to retain the single remaining grainstack so he could continue the series, allowing him to paint W1280 to W1290, each showing that single grainstack. After various delays during which Monet apparently made further adjustments to the paintings in the series, the first fifteen canvases were shown at an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, which opened on 4 May 1891. They all sold, for sums of up to 1,000 francs, and provided Monet with an excellent return for his winter’s work.
Looking at Grainstacks, End of Summer, considered to be one of the earliest in the series and numbered 1266, the trees behind the two grainstacks are still in full summer leaf, with no indication of the advent of autumn. Yet Monet’s signature gives the year as 1891. Looking at its paint surface in detail, some has been applied wet-in-wet and blended with underlying and adjacent paint, but many other brushstrokes have clearly been applied over dry underlayers.
Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, numbered 1286, is thought to be one of the later paintings in the series, apparently showing the sole remaining grainstack in the Spring of 1891. It too has multiple layers applied wet-on-dry, with many hatched brushstrokes in shades of orange and pink apparently applied over a well-dried surface. Below is a summary of the whole series.
Among the great dangers to grainstacks was fire.
Jules Breton’s The Burning Haystack from 1856 is mistitled, as it in fact shows a grainstack, as seen in the sheaves being removed from it in haste. The panic-stricken villagers must work quickly if they are to save a substantial part of their grain store for the coming winter.
Granaries incorporated an ingenious solution to exclude rats and mice: they were constructed on a support of staddlestones, each a pair of stones fashioned into the form of a mushroom. These are now commonly seen in the country, where they’re used to prevent drivers from running their vehicles over grass borders outside properties. Rats and mice are happy to climb vertical surfaces, but can’t cope with the overhang of the cap of a staddlestone, an ancient solution to the problem.
