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.

This is the time of year when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the grain harvest is in full swing, when the fields of cereal crops have ripened gold in the summer sun and are ready to be cut. This weekend I celebrate the climax of the farming year with some of the finest paintings of harvest in European art. Today I concentrate on cutting using a reaping hook or scythe, and tomorrow I look at the formation of sheaves and stocks, and threshing to separate the grain.

In the centuries before mechanical harvesting, cutting the crop was hard work and labour-intensive. It took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, while using a scythe typically took only 2 sweated 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.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows the whole village turned out to cut, process and transport the crop. This is a visual encyclopaedia of each of the steps involved in the grain harvest, as shown in the details below.

These men are 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 are gathered into stooks.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting usually 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 an 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.

He painted Wheat for the dealer Thomas Agnew in about 1860, and it became one of Linnell’s more successful works. It was shown at the Royal Academy shortly after completion, then at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in showing the goddess holding a sickle with a serrated edge, surrounded by sheaves of wheat. On her left she holds a shallow winnow used to separate the lighter chaff from the heavier grain, after threshing.

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.