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.

On the second day of this weekend’s visit to the fjords of Norway, we’ve reached the twentieth century, and a pupil of Eilert Adelsteen Normann (1848-1918).

Clearly inspired by Normann’s views of the fjords, Elisabeth Grüttefien’s style is quite distinct, as shown in her undated Fjord Landscape. Her greens are more vibrant, and there are some fluffy red patches in her blue sky.

In her Fjord with Steamer from about 1900, she includes a sailing boat and one of the larger steamships, just as might have appeared in Normann’s paintings.

She also found some different motifs. In Fjord Landscape, also from about 1900, it is spring, and there’s still plenty of snow left from the winter. Groups of birch trees have yet to come into leaf.

Sadly, Elisabeth Grüttefien then vanished, and her paintings stopped.

Nikolai Astrup, the last landscape artist in this series, spent most of his life in the hamlet of Jølster, to the north of Sognefjord, where his father was the parish priest. He trained under two great Norwegian painters, Harriet Backer and Christian Krogh, and under Lovis Corinth in Berlin. Unlike the previous artists, Astrup was no visitor to the fjords, he lived among them.

Kollen, translated as The Barren Mountain, or simply The Fell, (1905-06) shows one of the huge rocky outcrops towering over the coast of fjords and lakes in this part of Norway. Astrup must have painted this during the late winter.

Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. His father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard, a rite that had taken place many times over the preceding centuries, and was to follow the artist’s own early death in 1928.

Grey Spring Evening (before 1908) is one of Astrup’s finest paintings of Jølster Lake. In its suffuse light, the hill dominating the opposite bank has rich earths and a shallow strip of green fields near the water’s edge. The pale green spring foliage on the trees in the foreground is muted, and a rowing boat out in the middle of the lake seems a tiny speck lost in the midst of nature.

Jølster Lake is fed from meltwater from Jostedalsbreen, and there’s still abundant snow on the mountains in Astrup’s view of A June Night and Old Jølster Farm, with its lush carpet of marsh marigolds.

His prints clearly influenced his painting style. Kari – Motif from Sunde (c 1918) shows an elfin figure of a girl who has been painted as if in an illustration, or perhaps one of Carl Larsson’s popular albums.

The Cold Frame Mound (c 1921-28) reveals the Astrup family vegetable garden by their house at Sandalstrand, including the ‘cold frame’ of the title. Despite their name, cold frames actually protect plants from the cold, and are used to enable earlier starting of vegetable crops. Sinking the cold frame into the ground (and siting it on a high point) protects its contents from ground frosts, while covering it with glazed windows ensures that daylight can raise the air and soil temperatures within it.

For much of his career, Astrup’s prints and paintings had informed and influenced one another; The Befring Mountain Farms (c 1924-28) is an example of his mixing the media in a single work, coupling woodblock printing with oil painting. It shows an extended series of farm buildings not far from Jølster Lake.

Astrup uses the natural environment to generate one of his most magical works. Two people are engaged in milking a goat by the entrance to a building in the left foreground. The farm buildings have turf roofs with luxuriant growth, in one case sporting a small tree. Spindly birches stand next to them, their leaves shimmering in the light of the crescent moon. That moon is reflected in a small pond surrounded by marsh marigolds in full flower. You can hear the silence among the massive rock bluffs towering over the lake, and that in the centre looks like the head of an owl, watching over the stillness of the night.

The origin of the umbrella is lost in the mists of time. They have certainly been around in some form for a couple of millennia, but didn’t start to become popular in Europe until the eighteenth century. They have ecclesiastic relations in what’s known as an umbraculum, a small canopy placed over someone like the Pope to indicate their importance.

Although often indistinguishable, umbrellas can be used either to shelter from rain or to cast shade in strong sunlight, while parasols are intended only for the latter purpose. This article concentrates on those used in rain, and its sequel next week will examine those for the sun.

Being more recent, umbrellas don’t appear to have featured in classical or religious narratives, and are seldom involved in those more contemporary.

In Edmund Blair Leighton’s A Wet Sunday Morning from 1896, a well-dressed man is sheltering a young woman under his umbrella as they walk away from church in the rain. There’s a little more depth to this simple story, with two young women enthusiastically watching the couple from the top of the church steps, although no one seems to care about the old widow left to walk behind the couple, alone and without any shelter.

Edgar Degas’ superb narrative pastel painting Waiting (c 1882) shows two women sat side-by-side on a wooden bench in a corridor or waiting area within the ballet of the Paris Opera. Sat to the right of the dancer is a woman wearing black street clothing, holding an unrolled black umbrella, and with black walking or working shoes. Degas here invites the viewer to speculate in constructing their own narrative.

As umbrellas are notoriously hard to handle in strong wind, they may be used to tell the viewer how windy it is.

Christian Krohg’s The Umbrella from 1902 is an unusual one-off: a view looking down from the window of a building on a lone woman. She’s walking up a rough earth track, strewn with rocks, in windy weather, and her umbrella has been blown out by a fierce gust.

The post-Impressionist Maurice Prendergast uses this jostle of multicoloured Umbrellas in the Rain (1899), seen here in Venice, for their visual effect in forming a brilliant arc across the painting.

The great majority of umbrellas seen in paintings simply tell the viewer that it’s raining.

It might not be immediately obvious whether the umbrellas in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Pay to Pass, from about 1803, are intended to provide shelter from rain or sun. However, the family shown are just about to pay the man at the far left, so they can walk across the muddy street on the comfort of the wooden plank on which they’re standing. This spares them and their clothing a coating of mud from the street, and seems to have been common practice at the time.

Umbrellas grew steadily in popularity in Paris, and the painting below, Paris Street, Rainy Day from 1877, is probably the first masterpiece to show them in such widespread use. Gustave Caillebotte’s study for that finished work below has survived and is shown above.

As the rain continues to fall, all the larger figures in the painting are shown holding umbrellas, most of which are regulation black.

Realist artists like Jean Béraud painted street scenes in the French capital, in his case forming a Paris chronicle. Out in the provinces, painters like Nicolas Sicard were doing the same. Sicard’s Entrance to the Guillotière Bridge in Lyon (1879) captures the scene at rush hour on a wet day, as many are rushing around under the canopies of their umbrellas. Note how even the cab drivers are sheltering under umbrellas: those operating open cabs normally provided them for their passengers too.

Just before the Norwegian Naturalist Christian Krohg went to Grez-sur-Loing in France, he seems to have visited Normandy, where he painted this view of a Village Street in Normandy (1882). Its curved recession of umbrellas with disembodied legs is striking.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé, the tragically short-lived Marie Bashkirtseff, featured an umbrella in this, one of her best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer quickly becomes quite unnerving, an effect enhanced by the severe black background of the umbrella that she carries.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas from about 1881-86 is packed not only with people, but also their umbrellas. In parts they are so crushed together that the taller pedestrians are raising them high, to avoid bumping into others. Together they form a dark blue-grey band between the people below and the grey sky above.

My final painting of umbrellas used to shelter from rain is one of Nikolai Astrup’s early works, Farmstead in Jølster (1902). Two women, sheltering from the rain under their black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path threading its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl.

Paintings of the interiors of cowsheds and barns haven’t been prominent, but provide a more continuous record than any other type of interior because of their role in genre paintings of every age after the Renaissance. Here are a few.

Gerard ter Borch put the milkmaid and her cow at the centre of this painting, A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn from about 1652-54. As was universal at that time, milk was collected in a wooden bucket that would have been scrubbed thoroughly before use, but fell far short of modern standards of hygiene. At the upper right is a store of hay to supplement the cows’ diet during the winter.

David Teniers the Younger’s Barn Interior from about the same period shows a milkmaid pouring freshly collected milk into a large earthenware flask, through a muslin filter. This is taking place under the watchful eye of an older woman, probably the head of the domestic staff. Resting against a barrel is a well-worn besom that has seen good work keeping the floor clean.

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. The farmer’s wife, two children and dog are keeping him company as he works.

The Shearers (c 1833-35) is the most ambitious of Samuel Palmer’s paintings from the 1830s. This shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, in a sophisticated composition that draws the gaze to the brilliant and more distant view beyond. The curious collection of tools to the right was the subject of preparatory sketches, and seems to have been carefully composed. However, they have defied any symbolic interpretation, and may just ‘look right’ for a barn at the time.

Albin Egger-Lienz’s Farm in Grafendorf, from 1890, shows deeply rustic conditions on a dilapidated farm in Styria, Austria, as a young woman sits churning butter on a stone platform in a tumbledown barn. This isn’t the right environment for the preparation of food for human consumption.

Nikolai Astrup’s humorous painting of Early Courting from 1904 shows a young couple at the far left engaged in ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed in a Norwegian valley. This couple have sought the privacy of the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they’re being watched by someone up in the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom or watchful relative. The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, illuminating two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears to be decorated with small sketches, but those are actually piles of cow dung. And that’s where I’d like to leave it.