Ask anyone who has lived in the country and they’ll recall its idyllic moments. To end this series, I celebrate a few of those in paintings from the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

This Ukrainian farm labourer is caught relaxing for a moment in the sun and flowers of early summer in Mykola Kuznetsov’s early In Celebration (1879-81).

The pair of ploughmen in Giovanni Segantini’s Ploughing may not have had time to study the fine mountain views near the Alpine village of Savognin, but they and the other labourers in the right distance are enjoying the fine weather.

A couple of years later, Segantini’s High Noon in the Alps (1892) catches this shepherdess enjoying a brief break in her work, in the intense summer sunshine of the high plateau.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret shows that even itinerant workers could sit together and eat to the music of a violin when living In the Forest in 1893. Behind them are two oxen, and the forest that’s currently their home.

In Poland, Teodor Axentowicz’s painting of Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House from 1895 shows locals dancing the second most popular Polish folk dance after the polka. Most of these dancers are barefoot.

Edward Stott’s shepherd has stolen a moment of Peaceful Rest as his small flock drinks from a pond. He’s lighting a clay tobacco pipe, with his crook resting on his leg. Most of the painting uses a limited palette, with three splashes of colour standing out: the man’s face lit by the flame, the watchful sheepdog behind him, and a blue object protruding from the man’s jacket pocket.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Love in the Village shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches.

Idyllic moments indeed, but what happens in the country is often a far cry from the town.

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. He has a bottle of drink in his pocket; whether that’s to give him courage or to weaken the resistance of his girlfriend is unclear.

The 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. Courting in the country must have been a sensorily rich experience.

During the nineteenth century, paintings depicting ‘real’ life of ordinary people became increasingly popular, first in what has become known as social realism, pioneered by Jean-François Millet, then Naturalism, championed by Jules Bastien-Lepage until his untimely death in 1884. Among other themes, these put the case for the rural poor, and the desperate poverty that those living in the country had to endure.

Look carefully at many of their paintings, though, and the underlying stories aren’t as simple. One of the most evident problems is that many of those campaigning paintings used models who had been carefully posed. Look at their hands, feet and hair and you’ll often see someone who appears remarkably clean and kempt with no evidence of prolonged and arduous manual labour, even clothes that lack the dirt and mud so typical of those who work and walk on unpaved tracks and ploughed fields.

At the same time, photographic portraits of the poor became popular among some who sought to advance the art of photography. There are some notorious examples of early photographers who were caught posing carefully selected models in deliberately misleading circumstances, demonstrating how the camera can be made to lie.

My small selection of paintings of country people from the nineteenth century is an attempt to show some that appear most faithful records that weren’t intended to support political views or attract praise at a Salon.

Jules Breton had been born and brought up in the rural village of Courrières, and returned there to paint intimate portraits of those who continued to live there, including this Young Girl Knitting, seen in 1860. Many of these intimate works were sold to private collectors and have never been seen at exhibition.

His portrait of this Mother Feeding her Baby from 1863 shows her wearing clogs, and clothing that has seen better days. She is feeding a very young baby in front of a frugal fire in what can only be her normal domestic conditions.

Jean-François Millet had been born in the village of Gruchy, and was the first child of a farming family. Although his portrait of A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville from 1871 lacks fine detail to reinforce its authenticity, she’s clearly grubby and wasn’t painted in the studio.

Max Liebermann’s The Preserve Makers from 1879 shows a shed full of country women preparing foodstuffs for bottling and canning; the latter gradually came into use after 1810, but didn’t become popular until the First World War. This shows well the light factory work that was introduced to country areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who provided its labour force.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879 is an exception among these, in that it was not only submitted to the Salon of 1880, but won the artist a first-class medal. It was also supposedly painted from memory, showing an incident that the artist witnessed with a medical friend who was similarly called to assist with an injury.

Despite that, it shows a country doctor cleaning and bandaging the injured hand of a boy, as the rest of the extended family looks on. Conditions appear primitive: the small bowl of water is heavily blood-stained, and the cloth by it looks filthy. It’s also rich in detail that appears authentic, from the boy’s shoe compared with that of the doctor, to the bald man standing in front of a treasured grandfather clock in the right background.

Of Bastien-Lepage’s many portraits of country people, his Nothing Doing from 1882 appears the most convincing. From his unlaced mud-caked boots to his filthy and frayed waistcoat, this young agricultural worker looks the part. Bastien had spent his childhood in the village of Damvillers, although he was the son of a local artist. He frequently returned to his home village to paint local characters, such as this boy.

The young woman in Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884) has detailed features that appear true to life, in her bare feet with grubby and battered toenails, and hands that have seen hard work with the hook she holds.

Évariste Carpentier had been born into a farming family near the small town of Kuurne in Belgium. The Turnip Washer from 1890 is among the last of his thoroughly Naturalist paintings. Alongside the farmyard birds, two figures are busy washing piles of turnips in a small and dirty pond.

Throughout the career of Léon Augustin Lhermitte he painted the working lives of farmworkers and country people. In his pastel of The Farmworkers’ Supper from 1913, he shows those who have been working outdoors during the long day enjoying a meal at its end.

Together these paintings build a dispassionate image of a countryside that might have been lacking in worldly goods, but was hardly starved and pestilent. And, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article, at times rural life could still be idyllic.

One important staple crop has been largely forgotten from both agricultural and rural history: the humble potato. First imported from South America to Europe in the latter half of the sixteenth century, for the first couple of centuries it was considered exotic eating. It quietly became increasingly important during the eighteenth century, and is now widely credited as the food that enabled the population boom in much of Europe in the nineteenth century.

For several years from 1845, a fungus-like organism late blight caused widespread crop failure in the poorer parts of Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere, causing the Great Irish Famine, with at least a million dying from starvation.

The potato is unusual for storing large amounts of starch in its tuber. Although starch is only about one fifth of the potato by weight, the remainder being water, it came be the staple food for much of the working population, in both country and city. Overton has calculated using estimated crop yields from the early nineteenth century that an acre of potatoes would have provided about 2.5 times as many calories as an acre of wheat.

Like wheat, growing potatoes is a process of amplification. Tubers from the previous crop are sown in the ground, and multiply to yield many times the weight originally sown. Production is thus not dependent on conventional seed, but on seed potatoes with a more limited life. If a whole crop is destroyed by blight, not only is there nothing to eat that year, but the seed potatoes for the following year are also lost. Blight remains in the soil, and once affected that land has to be used for crops other than potatoes.

However, potatoes had other advantages in a war-torn and taxed Europe. While troops rampaging in foreign countryside would often raid or burn fields of grain, damaging or stealing potatoes proved more resistant to invaders. They were also likely to escape taxes or charges levied on other arable crops.

During the eighteenth century, labourers fortunate enough to have a little land they could farm for themselves started to grow potatoes, to supplement their limited diet. Small potato patches sprung up in the countryside, and around towns. Production at scale remained unusual until the following century, when some English counties including Lancashire and Middlesex devoted significant areas to supply the growing cities. That in turn depended on transport such as canals and then railways to deliver sacks of potatoes to urban consumers.

When Vincent van Gogh was living in Borinage in Belgium, he was among labourers whose staple food was potatoes, in one of the areas that had grown them for longer than most. His Still Life with Potatoes, painted in September 1885, is his tribute to the humble vegetable.

Potato production was painted extensively by social realists including Jean-François Millet, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Millet shows this back-breaking work in his Potato Planters from about 1861.

The Potato Harvest from 1855 is another more substantial work developed from Millet’s drawings. In the foreground, a man and woman are working together to fill sacks with the harvested potatoes, to be loaded onto the wagon behind them. The other four work as a team to lift the potatoes using forks and transfer them into wicker baskets, a gruelling task. Although the fields in the left distance are lit by sunshine, the dark scud-clouds of a heavy shower fill the sky at the right. Being poor, none of the workers has any wet-weather gear. The soil is also poor, full of stones, and yields would have been low despite the full sacks shown at the right.

Millet’s most famous single work, The Angelus, was completed around 1857-59. This had been commissioned by the American collector Thomas Gold Appleton, as Prayer for the Potato Crop, but underwent modification before Millet renamed it. At some stage, it’s thought to have included a child’s coffin, but that was overpainted.

It shows a couple, praying the Angelus devotion normally said at six o’clock in the evening, over the potatoes they have been harvesting. It’s dusk, and as the last light of the day fades in the sky, the bell in the distant church is ringing to mark the end of work, and the start of the evening. Next to the man is the fork he has been using to lift potatoes from the poor, stony soil; his wife has been collecting them in a wicker basket, now resting at her feet. Behind them is a basic wheelbarrow with a couple of sacks of potatoes on it, ready to be taken home.

Twenty years later, Jules Bastien-Lepage painted what’s now sometimes known as October or Potato Gatherers (1878), but was originally shown as October: Potato Gatherers.

Vincent van Gogh painted Woman Lifting Potatoes (1885) and similar scenes during his time living with his parents in Nuenen, in North Brabant, the Netherlands.

János Pentelei Molnár’s The Potato Harvest from 1901 takes this theme into the early years of the twentieth century, in Hungary.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s A Man Digging Potatoes from 1901 is pure social realism, as this smallholder uses his spade to lift the potatoes that are his staple diet. I believe that the plants shown here have suffered from potato blight, which also swept Europe periodically causing more famine and death.

Although the girls shown in Léon Frédéric’s Three Sisters from 1896 are clean and well dressed, they’re sat together peeling their staple diet of potatoes in a plain and barren farmhouse. A glimpse of the shoes of the girl at the left confirms that they’re neither destitute nor affluent.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) is another revealing insight into the lives of poor labourers in Nuenen, who are about to feast on a large dish of potatoes under the light of an oil lamp.

Émile Friant’s The Frugal Meal (1894) continues the social theme, as a poor family with four daughters sits down to a meal consisting of a bowl piled high with potatoes, and nothing else. More worryingly, the pot on the floor at the left is empty.

Further reading

Christopher Shepherd’s brilliant essay on the history of the potato in The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History (2024), ed. Jeannie Whayne, Oxford UP, ISBN 978 0 19 092416 4.

In the more northerly latitudes, grass that’s essential for cattle to graze grows little during the winter months. Farmers keeping cattle therefore have to provide alternative feed for their livestock for several months each year. This can include root crops such as brassica varieties including turnips and swedes (also known as rutabaga), but the most widespread is cut and dried grass as hay.

Where climate and day-length are suitable, as in much of England and France, dedicated hay meadows can provide two harvests each year. Left ungrazed through the winter, the first is normally ready to mow in the late Spring, and when there’s sufficient rainfall during the early summer, a second hay harvest can be obtained before the weather deteriorates in the early autumn. The mowing of hay has also been known as math, and mowing a second time is thus the aftermath or lattermath.

The essential requirement for hay is that it’s dried thoroughly, or it will rot over time and become unusable as fodder. In the centuries before mechanisation during the nineteenth century, this process was described as: first mow the grass, “scatter it about, gather it in windrows, cock it overnight, scatter it about, windrow it, cock it, and so on to the stack and stack it”. (Fussell) Those steps are shown well in paintings.

The companion to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of the grain harvest, The Hay Harvest from 1565 shows all stages in progress. In the left foreground a man is beating the blade on his scythe to sharpen it ready for mowing. Three women are striding towards him with the rakes they use to scatter and gather the mown hay. Behind them, in the valley, others are gathering the hay into small stacks or cocks, where it continues to dry before being loaded onto the hay wagon to be taken back to the farm.

At the right are wicker baskets containing other crops, including what appear to be peas or beans, together with a red fruit.

Ferdinand Hodler’s marvellous Mower from about 1898 is seen sharpening the blade on his heavy scythe using a whetstone, as the sun rises behind and to the left.

The couple in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Haymakers from 1877 are enjoying a short break from their labours, with the mown hay behind them still scattered to dry, before it can be raked into cocks.

Henri-Jean Martin painted Summer, or Mowers in 1903, as mechanisation was spreading across Europe. Several small clusters of men are mowing the hay in this meadow with their scythes, as three young women are dancing in a ring on the bed of flowers, and another sits nursing an infant.

Henry Moret’s Haymaking in Brittany from 1906 shows a smaller team busy mowing and raking on steeper ground.

In Camille Pissarro’s Divisionist painting of Haymaking, Éragny from the summer of 1887, a team of women are raking the cocks into haystacks.

Women in this hay meadow in Ukraine are raking in the harvest to be transported by a hay wain drawn by a pair of oxen, as painted in Mykola Pymonenko’s undated Haymaking.

In Jean-François Millet’s Haystacks: Autumn from about 1874, the harvest has been gathered, and three huge haystacks dominate the canvas. At the foot of one of them, a shepherd leans on his staff, resting from his labours as his flock grazes on the stubble.

Surplus hay was also a good cash crop for those who could get it transported to towns and cities. Along the east coast of England, barges were filled with hay then taken to London for sale. Much of the land in the county of Middlesex, to the west of London, was devoted to producing hay to feed horses in the city.

Robert Bevan’s painting of Hay Carts, Cumberland Market from 1915 is a view of London’s last hay market, near to the artist’s studio. By this time, the bales shown were made by mechanical baling machines and brought to London by barge.

In the next article in this series, I’ll look at a novel crop that soon became the staple food for many, the potato.