Once the ripe grain had been cut, the crop had to be gathered into sheaves, then those were assembled into stooks for transport by cart to await threshing, mechanical separation of the precious grain from straw. The latter was an important building material, and was used as thatch for the roof of most country buildings across Europe.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through a field of ripe wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters bearing their heavy-duty scythes, at the end of the day. They are awaiting payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

Adrian Stokes had further to travel for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings that he and his wife made of their protracted visits to Eastern Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut cereal wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind enhancing their strangeness.

John Linnell’s Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load (1853) shows the final wagonload of cut grain leaving the fields at dusk, as the harvest is completed.

Félix Vallotton’s The Sheaves from 1915 is one of his moving and symbolic images of the Great War. It’s late summer in 1914, harvest time, and the ripe corn is being cut and stacked in sheaves. But where are all those farmworkers, whose rakes rest against the sheaves, and whose lunch-basket sits on the ground ready to be eaten? Where is the wagon collecting the harvest, and why is the white gate in the distance closed?

In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) also shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, here drawing a threshing sledge.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals were being used as a source of power, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines before they were made mobile under their own power, as traction engines.