Once a cereal crop had been harvested and gathered for threshing, the fields might then be scavenged for any remaining grain, a process known as gleaning. Although this has been described since Old Testament times, there’s uncertainty as to who gleaned, and where they were able to glean. This article shows a selection of paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showing gleaning, to see if they cast further light on those questions.

Biblical accounts establish that gleaning was then a means for the poorest in society to acquire their own free supply of grain, and was a right of the poor. Some assume that the same practice continued, under the same right, until it fell into disuse in the late twentieth century. That ignores complex changes in land ownership and rights, and national law, and makes assumptions about rural economies that may not be correct.

The majority of those living in the country between 1500 and 1800 had little need for money. Almost everything they required in life was grown or made locally, and there were few if any consumer goods that they would need to purchase. Most lived in two sets of clothes: working dress, which was handed down, patched and repaired until it was unwearable, and a Sunday outfit worn when attending church, similarly inherited. Furniture was scant, made from local wood, and handed down through generations. Food and other goods that the family couldn’t supply itself would normally be obtained by barter with a neighbour. While those with more land and animals could sell them at market, and use the proceeds to buy luxuries, that remained out of the reach of the majority. It appears to have been that majority who gleaned the fields after harvest.

Although some countries in Europe retained gleaning rights on the strength of Biblical law, as land was enclosed and brought into increasingly complex systems of private ownership and rights, some land owners challenged that ancient right, and in 1788 a notable English legal case set the precedent that there was no universal right to glean, no matter how poor you might be. Nevertheless, many landowners continued to allow gleaning on their land, and in some areas these were celebrated alongside the harvest itself. Gleaning, like much else in the country, thus varied from country to country, and by region and village, but wasn’t confined to the poorest by any means.

One pitfall in looking at paintings of gleaning is that some are retelling the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz, rather than depicting contemporary gleaning.

In Samuel Palmer’s The Gleaning Field (c 1833), as in other accounts, gleaners appear to have been mostly women.

In 1854, Jules Breton returned to live in his home village of Courrières, not far from Calais in north-east France, and started painting agricultural workers in the local landscape. His style changed dramatically, and the following year he enjoyed success with his first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), which won him a third-class medal at the 1855 Paris Salon. Overseeing this gleaning is the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran. In the background, behind the grainstacks that were later to be such popular motifs for the Impressionists, is the village church tower, surrounded by its houses.

Breton had started to plan this painting soon after his return. He made a series of studies, several of which survive, for its figures, but the view appears to be faithful to reality. The figure of the young woman walking across the view from the right (in front of the garde champêtre) seems to have been modelled on the daughter of Breton’s first art teacher, whom the artist married in 1858.

Jean-François Millet’s hope for the Salon two years later was his substantial painting of The Gleaners (1857), which is completely different in concept. The distant wagon, grainstacks, and village may appear common elements, as are the three women bent over to glean in the foreground, but that is as far as the similarities go.

Millet’s composition is sparse, concentrating on those three figures. There are no distractions, such as the garde champêtre to add colour or humour: it’s all about poverty, and smacked of socialism; unlike Breton’s painting it got the thumbs-down from both the rich and the middle classes who frequented the Salon. Millet had also been born and brought up in the country, in his case further west on the north coast of France, in the Normandy village of Gruchy, where he had worked on the land.

Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) is one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, the loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he can go home for the night. Behind them a flock of sheep is grazing on the adjacent pasture.

Painted in 1880, Eugène Burnand’s Gleaners are set in high Alpine meadows, two girls with meagre gleanings. They are dressed in plain working clothes, but don’t appear particularly poor. Behind them a cart carries away the main harvest.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s most enduring expression of rural poverty was in showing four women salvaging the remains left in the fields after the harvest: the Gleaners, here his version of 1887. Lhermitte was another son of the country, this time Mont-Saint-Père in Picardy, inland in north-east France, although his father was a schoolteacher.

Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest in Denmark, but there’s much more to Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s story than that. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the gleaners to scavenge what they can from the fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed, and is almost certainly an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or ‘cowed’. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

Brendekilde took his name from the small village of Brændekilde, near Odense on the island of Funen in Denmark. The son of a clog maker, he lived with his grandparents for several years when a child, and at the age of ten made his living as a shepherd.

The Impressionists seldom seem to have painted controversial social issues. One of the few exceptions to this proved a lesson for Camille Pissarro in the practicality of Divisionism. He started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the painting hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which did the following year.

As Europe moved into the twentieth century, gleaning became increasingly unreal and romantic.

Gleaners were still commonplace in the Essex grain fields at harvest time, trying to scrape enough waste grain from the ground to feed their families. In Sir George Clausen’s Gleaners Coming Home from 1904, swirling brushstrokes make the gleaners’ improbably smart clothes appear to move as they walk home in the evening sunlight.

Clausen’s The Gleaners Returning (1908) is a marvellous contre-jour (into the light) view, again with swirling brushstrokes imparting movement in the women’s clothes, and no hint of their poverty.

Lhermitte’s Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) shows a group of women gleaning, two of them almost bent double.

Even when he was well into his seventies, Lhermitte seemed able to find time and energy for just another painting of gleaners, in his Gleaning Women of 1920.

With the increasing depopulation of Europe’s rural areas and the introduction of mechanical methods of harvesting, gleaning seems to have died out by the middle of the twentieth century, only to reappear around 2000. It’s now an organised voluntary activity arranged with farmers, to recover crops unsuitable for mechanical harvesting, and other recoverable sources.

As with many other aspects of rural life, gleaning appears to have varied according to era and location. In some areas it seems to have been confined to those who were struggling to provide sufficient food for themselves, in the Biblical tradition. In others it was more general, and a normal phase of the harvest supplying most families with a free top-up of grain they could get ground by a miller to add to their supply of bread in the coming winter. It could also yield substantial amounts of grain: one report claims a widow and her three sons gleaned 325 kg (720 pounds) of wheat from one harvest. After all, if left in the field where it was, it would only have been ploughed back into the ground later in the autumn, and gone to waste.

Reference

David Hoseason Morgan (1982) Harvesters and Harvesting 1840-1900, Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 74476 9.

The climax of the year in arable farming is the harvest, when the sustained labour of the previous year pays off. For the farmer, this is the return on that investment, and for the labourers it’s when they hope to get paid their bonus. It’s the one time of the year when everyone turns to and works from before dawn until well after dusk in a united effort to harvest the ripe crop, before the weather breaks and it might be ruined.

The harvest depends on the crop being grown; as cereals, particularly wheat, were the most important across much of Europe, I’ll here concentrate on the processes required to turn them from ripe plants to grain ready for the miller to grind into flour. This article looks at the first step in that, cutting the crop, bundling it into sheaves and stacking those in stooks.

Current accounts of the grain harvest distinguish several tools used to cut the crop:

• handheld sickle, lightweight and normally with a serrated blade,
• handheld reaping hook, lightweight and with a smooth blade,
• handheld bagging or fagging hook, heavier and with a smooth blade, used in conjunction with a hooked stick or metal pick thank,
• long-handled scythe, heavy and held with both hands, with a smooth blade.

Some claim that reaping using a handheld sickle or hook was used for wheat and rye, but that barley and oats were more usually mown with a larger scythe. Although that doesn’t appear to be accurate, it’s clear that the use of scythes was considerably more efficient. While it took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, using a scythe typically took only 2 worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.

The tool used also determined the length of straw stalk cut with the head of grain, thus the height of the stubble left on the field. Sickles and hooks were often used when less straw was required, leaving high stubble that might be mown with a scythe later. Low reaping or bagging, or mowing with a scythe, created longer straw that was suitable for thatching.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows men cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.

Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they’re gathered into stooks.

Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Garden Still Life, with Implements, Vegetables, Dead Game, and a Bust of Ceres (The Attributes of Hunting and Gardening) from 1774 shows at its left edge a long-handled scythe, and at the right a sickle or reaping hook. Scythes were also used extensively for mowing hay and weeds.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto the oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.

Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in that the goddess is shown holding a sickle with a serrated edge, and is surrounded by sheaves of wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, as they await 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.

During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.

The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.

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 ripe wheat.

Finally, conventional corn stooks were by no means universal across Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut corn (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 only enhancing the feeling of strangeness.

These paintings suggest that, between 1550 and 1890, wheat was generally cut using scythes when suitable men were available. Otherwise, it would be cut using a hook, most likely for reaping rather than bagging. Wheat was normally cut low to preserve the stalk as straw suitable for thatching, then tied into sheaves before being stacked into stooks.

That left the fields ready for gleaning.

If you have any interest in rural history, you may have noticed how few of its accounts are illustrated. There are extensive quotations from written accounts of life in the country, farming practice, and figures gleaned from the analysis of surveys and wills, but no pictures. Yet in the centuries before photography came into widespread use, artists recorded landscapes and life in the countryside in paint. This article introduces a new series in which I’m going to look at the reality of life and work in the country using some of its finest depictions.

In 1500, the countries in Europe were overwhelmingly rural, with about 80% of their people living in the countryside and engaged almost entirely in agricultural work. By the end of the nineteenth century that had reversed, with 80% living and working in cities and towns. Working the land was physically arduous with only the aid of manual tools, oxen and horses. Injuries were common and seldom received any medical attention, and for most life was brief.

The first agricultural revolution brought the transition from hunting for and gathering food to cultivating crops and raising livestock. This brought annual events such as the grain harvest, shown above in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565), which forms a complete visual reference to all the work involved in creating flour from a ripe cereal crop.

While men wielded large scythes to mow some crops, others were cut with the sickle shown in Jules Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884). This young woman is walking barefoot through the fields on her way to start another day harvesting the grain she and her village relied on to keep them from starvation.

Old Testament accounts of the underprivileged surviving by gleaning what’s left after the landowner had brought in their harvest continued well into the twentieth century. This is Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s account from 1887. In many areas, though, gleaning was a common essential for everyone.

Crop yields in the past were far lower than they are today. There was no understanding of soil fertility, crop rotations led to poor soil quality, and most land was too wet for the primitive ploughs in use. It was often necessary to plough the same land five or more times in a year to eradicate weeds and achieve worthwhile crop yields. In Jean-François Millet’s Angelus, completed around 1857-59, a destitute couple are seen praying over their small basket of potatoes, as they try to eke a living from that pitifully poor soil.

Some problems remain the same, although their solutions are now quite different.

George Morland’s Ratcatchers from 1793 shows a couple of itinerant workers with the dogs they used to catch vermin such as rats, the man on the left holding up one of their successful catches.

Our ancestors determined the landscapes we see today. In much of England, this has been attributed to the appropriation of what had been common land, for large farms operated by the land-owning classes, in what’s known as enclosure.

The whole countryside changed, as previously open land used for communal grazing was enclosed and turned into farmland. John Crome captures this in this painting of Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c 1818-20), showing the low rolling land to the north-east of the city, which had been open heath and common land until the late eighteenth century. By 1810, much of it had been enclosed, and ploughed up for agriculture.

Crome opposed the enclosure of common land, and here shows the rich flora, free grazing, and, for the plains of East Anglia, rolling countryside. In the right distance some of the newly created farmland is visible as a contrast. Fortunately, almost two hundred acres (74 hectares) of this heath have been preserved, but it had been considerably more extensive until 1790.

Agricultural practices have left other marks in our landscapes. In parts of England and Wales, there are two types of countryside, those drawn with straight lines and others featuring curves. These are even seen in roads, which follow old field boundaries. In some areas the roads are generally straight, but in others they wiggle all over the place, like a drunken man.

Sir William Nicholson’s view from The Hill above Harlech, painted in about 1917, looks across the broad sweep of sand in Tremadoc Bay towards the distant Lleyn Peninsula, in North Wales. Much of the land seen here is divided up into small fields by well-maintained hedges, and there’s hardly a straight line to be seen until you get down to the coastal plane.

One of the major reasons for all these curves is ploughing.

Robert Bevan’s The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is probably a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough which needed to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here. Because of this need to turn, the ploughman’s course was far from straight, but usually traced a gentle reversed S. To enable this team of horses to turn at the top of the furrow, they steered to the left before swinging to the right in the arc that would bring them on course for the furrow heading back down the slope.

When those ploughed strips were enclosed by hedges, their edges were curved with their furrows. In time, tracks ran along those hedges, and in the nineteenth century they were turned into roads, which now twist and turn as they run past those old furrows.

In the nineteenth century, the first signs of mechanisation arrived, using either horses or steam for power.

Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893, shows a fine example of horses being used to thresh the grain from freshly cut cereal. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines, and the next step was to make those engines mobile under their own power, as traction engines and eventually tractors.

When heavy steam traction engines were replaced by tractors with internal combustion engines, teams of oxen and horses were replaced by these new-fangled vehicles. Heinrich Vogeler’s Farmer Ploughing from the period 1930-42 shows a tractor with its own tracks towing a heavy plough. I doubt whether even the most visionary farmworker of the sixteenth century imagined what was to come.

I hope that you will join me in this series over the coming weeks.