Democrats will soon have a leadership vacuum, and there will be no shortage of highly ambitious governors, senators and transportation secretaries looking to fill it.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff after her concession speech last week. She is expected to remain influential in the party, but other prominent Democrats will be more aggressively angling for leadership roles.
Kamala Harris would have been the first female president in the nation’s nearly 250-year history. But many women chose Donald Trump, despite his history of sexism and his support for the end of Roe v. Wade.
Shanghai straddles the past and the future, a dizzying prism of many histories and cultures. The poet Sally Wen Mao shares books that illuminate this cosmopolitan city.
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.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525–1569), The Hay Harvest (1565), oil on panel, 114 x 158 cm, Lobkowicz Palace, Prague, Czechia. Wikimedia Commons.
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 (1853–1918), The Mower (c 1898), oil on canvas, 71.5 × 114 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), Les Foins (Haymakers) (1877), oil on canvas, 160 x 195 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
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 Guillaume Martin (1860–1943), Summer, or Mowers (1903), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Capitole de Toulouse, Toulouse, France. Image by Didier Descouens, via Wikimedia Commons.
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 (1856–1913), Haymaking in Brittany (1906), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des beaux-arts de Vannes, Vannes, France. Wikimedia Commons.
Henry Moret’s Haymaking in Brittany from 1906 shows a smaller team busy mowing and raking on steeper ground.
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Haymaking, Éragny (1887), oil on canvas, 50 x 66 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.
In Camille Pissarro’s Divisionist painting of Haymaking, Éragny from the summer of 1887, a team of women are raking the cocks into haystacks.
Mykola Pymonenko (1862–1912), Haymaking (date not known), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Fine Arts Museum Kharkiv Харківський художній музей, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), Haystacks: Autumn (c 1874), oil on canvas, 85.1 x 110.2 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
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 (1865–1925), Hay Carts, Cumberland Market (1915), oil on canvas, 47.9 x 61 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
The first twenty or so chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’ groundbreaking modern novel Don Quixote consist of a series of largely self-contained comic misadventures. After the knight and his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza release a group of convicts, they fear for their safety, so head for the mountains. Once there, events become more interrelated and complex, presenting even greater challenges to those who tried to paint them in standalone works, rather than illustrations accompanying the text.
The pair find a hoard of gold coins apparently abandoned with a notebook in a travel bag. Then Don Quixote catches a glimpse of a man leaping around the bushes half-naked, and suspects that he’s the owner of the bag and its coins. A little way around the hillside, they find a dead mule whose owner they think had carried that bag.
This scene must have fascinated the French artist Honoré Daumier, who painted a series of oil sketches of it in about 1867.
Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), Don Quixote and the Dead Mule (after 1864), oil on panel, 24.8 x 46 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
In the first, the knight leads his squire towards the dead mule.
Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), Don Quixote and the Dead Mule (1867), oil on canvas, 132.5 × 54.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr.
This rough oil sketch shows them drawing even closer.
Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in the Sierra (1866/68), oil on canvas, 29.5 x 45 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in the Sierra is more generic, and omits the dead mule altogether.
A little later, Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, so the knight dispatches him on his own horse Rocinante to obtain three replacement donkeys, and deliver a letter to the Lady Dulcinea, Quixote’s semi-imaginary ‘lady’ of his chivalric quests. Meanwhile, the knight laments and feigns madness for the lady. Panza meets their village priest and barber, and they agree to deceive Quixote in a bid to persuade him to return to the village for his madness to be treated.
As the three head back towards Don Quixote, they meet Dorotea, who had previously been tricked and seduced. She agrees to dress up as a fine lady and pose as Princess Micomicona, who purports to have come all the way from Guinea to ask a boon of the knight.
Pedro González Bolívar (dates not known), The Introduction of Dorotea to Don Quixote (1881), oil on canvas, 100 x 88 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
Pedro González Bolívar’s painting of The Introduction of Dorotea to Don Quixote from 1881 shows their meeting. Without that background information, this would prove impossible to read.
Don Quixote is persuaded to leave the mountains and return home with them, but that’s the start of another series of misadventures. During these, Dorotea’s true identity is revealed, and at dinner Don Quixote gives a long and impassioned speech in which he argues surprisingly rationally in favour of the pre-eminence of arms over learning.
Manuel García Hispaleto (1836–1898), Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters (1884), oil on canvas, 152 x 197 cm, Palacio del Senado de España, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
This is recorded in Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters from 1884. Sancho Panza stands immediately behind the knight, at the head of the table, on the right. Seated along the table’s length are a man who has just arrived from Algiers with a Moorish woman, the village priest, and others.
Don Quixote’s madness only continues, and eventually he has to be bundled into an oxcart and taken home.
Hippolyte Lecomte (1781–1857), Don Quixote’s Homecoming (date not known), oil on canvas, 27.5 x 38.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
On a Sunday when all the locals are out in the square, the oxcart bearing Don Quixote enters his village at noon, as shown in Hippolyte Lecomte’s undated Don Quixote’s Homecoming. At the left, Don Quixote’s niece or housekeeper holds her hands up in horror at his condition. To the left of the cart are the priest and barber, still mounted. Sancho Panza is riding his donkey, and has been greeted by his wife and their children, who are more interested in how many fine skirts he brought back for her, and how many pairs of shoes for their children.
Miguel Jadraque y Sánchez (1840–1919), Visit of the Priest and Barber to Don Quixote (1880), oil on canvas, 53 x 64.5 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
The priest and barber leave Don Quixote alone to recover for a month after their return, then reassess him, as shown by Miguel Jadraque in this Visit of the Priest and Barber to Don Quixote from 1880. Don Quixote is becoming animated with them as he sits up in bed. In the left background are the knight’s niece and housekeeper, praying in vain for his recovery.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then leave on their third sally, which first takes them on a futile mission to El Toboso in quest of the Lady Dulcinea. After that, they head towards the city of Saragossa, and meet a cart full of players in costume, who create mayhem.
Carlos Vásquez Úbeda (1869-1944), Don Quixote (date not known), oil on canvas, 160 x 278 cm, Musée Goya, Castres, France. Image by Tylwyth Eldar, via Wikimedia Commons.
Carlos Vásquez Úbeda shows this encounter in his undated painting of Don Quixote. At this stage, the pair are still on their mounts, but shortly afterwards a clown causes Rocinante to bolt and throw Don Quixote, and one of the other players rides off on the squire’s donkey. For once, Sancho manages to persuade his master not to retaliate, and they continue on their way without coming to grief.
Later, they meet a group from a village, and are invited to attend a wedding there the following day.
The wedding brings an elaborate deception in which the bride’s first suitor appears to impale himself on his own sword so that he can marry the bride as his dying wish, but then miraculously comes back to life, to cheat the groom from marrying the bride as had been expected. Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of The Marriage of Basilio and Quiteria from 1881 shows the priest officiating in the centre, as the bride to the right is married to the dying suitor, who is supported by Don Quixote with his lance. The groom stands at the front of the tent at the right, staring in disbelief at what’s going on.
Gustave Doré (1832–1883), Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria (c 1863), oil on canvas, 92.1 x 73 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
The newlyweds entertain Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for three days, enabling them to visit the Cave of Montesinos and the Lakes of Ruidera nearby. Gustave Doré, whose illustrations for the whole book have been used by others as the basis for further illustrated editions, painted this non-narrative scene of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria in about 1863.
In the middle of Cervantes’ second book of Don Quixote, the knight and his squire Sancho Panza become guests of a Duke and Duchess who had already read Cervantes’ first book, and set out to trick the pair into further comical misadventures. Soon after their arrival, the Duke’s chaplain asserts that Don Quixote isn’t a knight errant at all, causing the knight to deliver a searing riposte.
Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro (1857–1929), Don Quijote in the Duke’s House (1878), media not known, 87.4 x 133.1 cm, Pena Palace, Sintra, Portugal. Wikimedia Commons.
Out of the blue, maids arrive to wash and lather the knight’s beard, and that of the Duke, in a procedure that defuses a tense situation by transforming it into the absurd. Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro’s painting of Don Quijote in the Duke’s House from 1878 shows this bizarre moment, with the rotund figure of Sancho Panza at the left, the gaunt Don Quixote in the centre, and the Duke and Duchess seated at the right, in obvious amusement.
Although Cervantes had completed Don Quixote in 1615, and it quickly became popular across Europe, it appears to have been painted infrequently before the nineteenth century. Only Valero Iriarte seems to have painted its comical adventure stories in the previous century. Although Eugène Delacroix painted the non-narrative Don Quixote in his Library in 1824, Cervantes’ novel was generally ignored by the major narrative artists of the nineteenth century, who continued depicting mostly classical myth.
These paintings demonstrate how modern fiction can form the basis for successful narrative painting, even though that has remained unusual.
Telling a story in a painting intended to be viewed independently of its literary account requires great skill. Illustrations have the advantage that they’re going to be seen alongside the words, but a narrative painting could be exhibited almost anywhere. The most popular solution is to depict the best-known myths and legends, typically from classical times, stories that all educated viewers should be familiar with.
Painting a modern novel is even more of a challenge, making those showing Miguel de Cervantes’ epic Don Quixote, published in 1605 and 1615, among the boldest of all narrative paintings. A few years ago I published a long series of summaries of the book accompanied by paintings and illustrations. This weekend I look at just the former, from outside the immediate context of the literary account, considering whether they work as narrative paintings.
Mariano de la Roca y Delgado (1825–1872), Miguel de Cervantes imagining El Quixote (1858), oil on canvas, 171 x 210 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
Cervantes himself spent at least two periods in prison, and it’s claimed that he started work on Don Quixote during the second of those. Mariano de la Roca’s painting of Miguel de Cervantes imagining El Quixote from 1858 may be as fictitious as the book, but reveals a clear vision of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza. Their mounts are caricatured, but Don Quixote is fully detailed complete with the barber’s basin he wears as a helmet.
Nils Kreuger (1858–1930), Don Quixote’s Horse Rosinante (1911), oil on cardboard, 50 x 63 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Image by Bodil Karlsson, via Wikimedia Commons.
Nils Kreuger’s portrait of Don Quixote’s Horse Rocinante from 1911 is non-narrative, but nevertheless a fine painting, with the knight seated against the base of a tree and staring into the distance.
Quixote’s first, solo and briefest sally takes him to an inn, where he insists the innkeeper dubs him as a knight, as depicted by Valero Iriarte, who is now known almost exclusively for his paintings of this book.
Valero Iriarte (1680–1753), Don Quixote at the Inn (c 1720), oil on canvas, 54 x 78 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
Iriarte’s first scene of Don Quixote at the Inn (c 1720) shows one of the earliest comic events in the book, in which the landlord pours wine into a hollowed-out length of cane to enable the aspiring knight to drink through his helmet. Immediately beforehand, the two women had fed him, as his hands had been fully occupied in holding up his cardboard visor. To anyone familiar with the opening chapters of Cervantes’ book, this would have been instantly recognisable.
Valero Iriarte (1680–1753), Don Quixote Dubbed a Knight (c 1720), oil on canvas, 54 x 78 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
Iriarte’s second scene is set inside the inn, with Don Quixote Dubbed a Knight (c 1720). Quixote is on his knees ready for the ceremony, while the fat innkeeper stands behind with his back to the viewer, busy rehearsing his reading. To the left of Quixote is a young lad holding a candle, and a prostitute is holding the knight’s lance as she’s negotiating with her next customer, to the right. Again, Iriarte tells the story true to Cervantes’ account, and it’s readily recognisable.
After a couple of tragi-comic adventures, Don Quixote returns home battered and bruised.
Wilhelm Marstrand (1810–1873), Don Quixote’s First Ride Home (date not known), oil on canvas, 85 x 125 cm, Nivaagaards Malerisamling, Nivå, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
One of his neighbours came past with a donkey, on which the knight was placed. To avoid any embarrassment, they don’t enter the village until after dark. Wilhelm Marstrand’s undated painting captures the sense of defeat during Don Quixote’s First Ride Home.
Don Quixote recruits Sancho Panza to be his squire during the fortnight he spends at home after that first sally. The pair then ride out together and engage in the most famous of their adventures, when Quixote attacks a windmill, convinced that it’s a giant.
José Moreno Carbonero (1860-1942), Don Quixote and the Windmills (c 1900), oil on canvas, 290 x 279 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
José Moreno’s painting of Don Quixote and the Windmills from about 1900 portrays the climax perfectly, as the knight and his charger are hoisted aloft by one of the windmill’s sails, as it rotates with the wind.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then endure further misadventures, during which the knight loses part of his helmet and some of his left ear. They accept the hospitality of some goatherds for the night, and the following morning attend the burial of a local scholar whose death resulted from his unrequited love for a young shepherdess. She appears at the burial and denies responsibility, as painted by Cecilio Pla and Valero Iriarte.
Cecilio Pla (1860–1934), Marcela the Shepherdess (1905), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.
Pla’s Marcela the Shepherdess from 1905 shows her standing defiantly above the scholar’s grave.
Valero Iriarte (1680–1753), The Story of Shepherds Grisóstomo and Marcela (c 1701-44), oil on canvas, 162 x 220 cm, Museo Casa de Cervantes, Valladolid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
Valero Iriarte’s Story of Shepherds Grisóstomo and Marcela (c 1701-44) is overambitious in its detail. The shepherdess stands at the far right, well away from the burial taking place at the far left. Between them are Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, engaged in conversation.
The pair become involved in further unfortunate incidents, culminating in Don Quixote leaving an inn without paying for their accommodation. The knight then makes another spectacular error when he mistakes flocks of sheep for armies about to join in battle, a story that sticks in the mind.
Johann Baptist Zwecker (1814–1876), Don Quixote (1854), oil on canvas, 71 x 91 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
As Johann Baptist Zwecker shows in his painting of Don Quixote from 1854, the knight then charges at the armies of sheep with his lance, to the annoyance of the drovers, who retaliate by knocking out several of his teeth with their slingshot.
A turning point in this second sally occurs when the pair free a dozen convicts who turn on them by bombarding them with rocks, then run away. Fearing that they are in danger, the knight and his squire ride off to hide in the mountains, as shown below in Adrien Demont’s painting of Don Quixote from 1893.
Adrien Demont (1851–1928), Don Quixote (1893), oil on canvas, 111 x 156 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Wikimedia Commons.
Tomorrow I’ll show paintings of what happened next.
在传统摄影中，既要考虑镜头和胶片的色彩搭配，还要外接柔光滤镜，才能实现类似的效果，而 Find X8 Pro 则试图通过计算摄影一步到位，从样片来看，效果是喜人的。
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No matter what your background, religion or culture, there’s one universal cause for feasting and celebration, a wedding. One of the great challenges for the figurative painter, weddings are the central feature in three classical myths and one religious story examined in this article; tomorrow’s sequel looks at the depiction of less famous, personal weddings.
Of the three great mythical weddings, the first in chronological order was that of Hippodame and Pirithous, which brought an end to the dominance of centaurs on earth, the Centauromachy. This was celebrated in prominent places: the subsequent battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs was shown in sculpture on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and on the Parthenon at Athens. It was Ovid, though, who chose to tell this story in the context of the Trojan War.
When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried off Hippodame by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked. Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at Eurytus, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.
Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522), The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15), oil on wood, 71 x 260 cm, The National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.
Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15) is my favourite among the earlier paintings of the ultimate wedding feast gone wrong. In the centre foreground, Hylonome embraces and kisses the dying Cyllarus, a huge arrow-like spear resting underneath them. Immediately behind them, on the large carpets laid out for the wedding feast, centaurs are still abducting women. All around are scenes of pitched and bloody battles, with eyes being gouged out, and Lapiths and Centaurs wielding clubs and other weapons at one another. This is definitely a wedding to remember, if you survived it.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38), oil on canvas, 182 × 290 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
Towards the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens painted The Rape of Hippodame (1636-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off Hippodame, the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.
The next wedding to be grateful you missed was that between the great hero Perseus and the princess whom he rescued from Cetus the sea monster. Andromeda’s parents were so delighted at their daughter’s rescue that she, who had already been promised in marriage to Phineus, was quickly married instead to Perseus. At the wedding feast, Phineus and his friends were understandably rather miffed, and a violent quarrel broke out between them and Perseus. As happens at the most memorable of weddings, this turned seriously nasty when weapons came out and bodies started to fall. The solution for Perseus was to brandish the head of Medusa and turn Phineus and his friends into cold statuary.
Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) and Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri) (1581-1641), Perseus and Phineas (1604-06), fresco, dimensions not known, Palazzo Farnese, Rome. Wikimedia Commons.
Annibale Carracci and Domenichino combined their talents in painting this fresco of Perseus and Phineas (1604-06) in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety.
Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa (date not known), oil on canvas, 113.5 × 146 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours, Tours, France. Wikimedia Commons.
Surprisingly few paintings of this wedding make reference to the goddess Minerva’s protection of Perseus, which is clearly expressed in Jean-Marc Nattier’s undated painting of Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa. The goddess, Perseus’ half-sister, is sat on a cloud to the right of and behind the hero. She wears her distinctive helmet, grips her spear, and her left hand holds the Aegis, providing narrative closure.
Perseus points his weapons away from himself and Minerva, and is looking up towards the goddess. In the foreground, one of Phineus’ party seems to be sorting through the silverware, perhaps intending to make off with it. The happy couple picked themselves up from the bodies, statues and debris, and moved on. Perseus gave thanks to Minerva for her support and the loan of her shield, by the votive offering of Medusa’s head, which Minerva had set into her shield, turning it into the Aegis.
The wedding of Thetis, sea nymph and spinster of this parish, and Peleus, king of Phthia and bachelor of that parish, was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, had not been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’.
Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), The Golden Apple of Discord (1633), oil on canvas, 181 × 288 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
This is Jacob Jordaens’ The Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, which is at the centre of the grasping hands, above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too. This sets up the Judgement of Paris, and the rest is legendary.
Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), The Feast of Peleus (1872-81), oil on canvas, 36.9 x 109.9 cm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Wikimedia Commons.
For once it’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.
This wedding banquet set up the beauty contest between Juno, Venus and Minerva in the Judgement of Paris. Venus won following her bribe promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened at the time to be married to King Menelaus of Sparta. After Paris abducted Helen to Troy, the Greeks united to wage war against Troy, eventually capturing and destroying the city.
Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), The Marriage Feast at Cana (1562-3), oil on canvas, 667 × 994 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
In 1562, Paolo Veronese was commissioned to paint a large work for the refectory of the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Its central narrative is an episode of the ministry of Christ as recorded in the gospels: Christ and his disciples were invited to a wedding feast in Cana, Galilee. Towards its end, the wine started to run out, and he was asked what they should do. He directed servants to fill jugs with water, which he then miraculously turned into wine.
This huge canvas shows Christ, distinguished by his halo, at the centre of his disciples, with the Virgin Mary (also with halo) at his right, and sundry disciples arrayed along that side of the tables. The wedding group is at the far left of the party.
Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), The Marriage Feast at Cana (detail) (1562-3), oil on canvas, 667 × 994 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
At the far right of the canvas, wine is shown being poured from a large container, a clear cue to the gospel narrative.
Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), The Marriage Feast at Cana (detail) (1562-3), oil on canvas, 667 × 994 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
There’s also a great deal of other activity in every part of the painting. On the balcony behind Christ there are scenes of the butchery of meat, which is generally claimed to be lamb and symbolic of Christ’s future death as a sacrifice for mankind, as the ‘Lamb of God’, although there are no visual clues to support that interpretation. In the musicians below, and other guests, it is claimed that there are portraits of artists, including Veronese himself, and Titian. Other important figures who are supposed to be shown include Eleanor of Austria, Francis I of France, Mary I of England, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Emperor Charles V.
Finally, I turn to one of many weddings in more modern European literature.
Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti IV (1482-83), tempera on panel, 83 x 142 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
The eighth story told on the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron concerns the misfortunes of one Nastagio Degli Onesti, involving one ghost killing and dismembering the ghost of a woman, a strange and grisly tale told in a series of four panels by Botticelli. The fourth and last shows the hero Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.
Ancient farmers discovered that repeatedly growing the same crop on the same plot of land soon led to falling yields and crop failure. We now understand this is the result of falling soil fertility: as successive harvests extract nitrogen and other essentials from the soil, without their replenishment there’s none for the plants to incorporate into their fruit or seed. Although animal fertiliser could compensate to some extent, the only solution was to ‘rest’ that land, to allow its soil fertility to be restored.
In southern Europe, including lands bordering the Mediterranean, crop rotation had been adopted by classical times, and was described by the Roman poet Virgil. This typically followed a two-year cycle:
In one year, the plot would be ploughed and sown, sometimes in both Spring and autumn, to grow crops for harvest.
The following year, that plot would be left unused, lying fallow.
As a result, at any time half the arable land would be productive, and half fallow and without a crop.
In northern Europe, a three-year cycle developed during the Middle Ages and later. This might run:
In one year, the plot would be ploughed and sown in the autumn with a winter grain crop.
The following year, that plot would be sown in the early Spring, with a grain or forage crop, or legumes (peas or beans).
The third year, that plot would left fallow until the autumn, when it started the cycle again with autumn ploughing.
This is reflected in a different pattern in arable land, with only a third of it being left fallow at any time.
During the seventeenth century, farmers in the Low Countries appear to have adopted more elaborate rotations, and those were imported to England as the Norfolk Four-Course Rotation in the following century. In this:
The first year brought a wheat crop, sown in the Spring and harvested at the end of summer.
The second year brought roots, such as swedes or turnips, normally used to feed cattle, which grazed the land and enriched it with manure.
The third year brought barley or oats, sown in the Spring and harvested at the end of summer.
The fourth and final year the plot was rested with grass and clover, again used to graze cattle which enriched it with manure.
This depended on integrating livestock production with arable farming, by adding cows to the sheep-corn system, which had become increasingly popular over this period.
One way to assess this is in paintings of farmed countryside, looking at the patterns of usage in fields. I show a small selection of examples here.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525–1569), The Harvesters (1565), oil on panel, 119 x 162 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565, much of the land visible is devoted to a single wheat crop, sown at the same time, and harvested together at the end of the summer. Some fields on the lower ground, closer to the town and estuary in the distance, are still green, though, suggesting they may be pasture being grazed during their fallow year.
At the same time as crop rotations were being developed, land was being enclosed and its use transformed from communal grazing for livestock to arable fields. 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.
Alexandre Calame (1810–1864), Swiss Landscape (c 1830), oil on paper mounted on canvas, 40 × 52 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.
At about the same time, Alexandre Calame’s Swiss Landscape shows the shore of one of the country’s large lakes, probably Lake Geneva, with much smaller plots of land within large open fields, and a range of different crops being cultivated. This is more typical of the older sub-divided fields close to villages during earlier centuries in England.
Thomas Seddon (1821–1856), Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany (1853), oil on canvas, 57.5 x 74.9 cm, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico. Wikimedia Commons.
By 1853, when the Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist Thomas Seddon visited Brittany and painted Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany, this small village had retained similar small plots being farmed in different ways, almost like the allotment gardens that developed around cities at this time.
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Côte de Jalais, Pontoise (1867), oil on canvas, 87 x 114.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
Fields shown on the side of Les Jalais in Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise from 1867 are divided into larger strips, and are at different stages of cultivation. Some are still earth brown following ploughing, others are green, and some may be ready to harvest. These appear to be in a longer crop rotation, perhaps four-course.
Although the classical two-year cycle was retained for longer in southern France, by 1890-92 when Paul Cézanne painted this Hillside in Provence, the pattern of colour in the fields makes it more likely that a three-year or longer rotation was in use.
Percy Shakespeare (1906–1943), December on the Downs, Wartime (c 1939-44), oil on canvas, 62.5 x 92.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
By the early twentieth century, most farmland in England had been enclosed, but the fields in Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, from the period 1939-44, remain open and still in use for a sheep-wheat system.
Perhaps the lesson here is that accounts of land use and crop rotations are too generalised to reflect the rich variety of local farming methods. As I have so far concentrated on arable and sheep farming, in the next article I’ll look at cattle and milk production.
When the first Macs with internal hard disks started shipping in 1987, they were revolutionary. Although they still used 800 KB floppy disks, here at last was up to 80 MB of reliable high-speed storage. It’s worth reminding yourself of just how tiny those capacities are, and the fact that the largest of those hard disks contained one hundred times as much as each floppy disk. By the 1990s, with models like the Mac IIfx, internal hard disks had doubled in capacity, and reached as much as 12 GB at the end of the century.
Over that period we discovered that hard disks also needed routine maintenance if they were to perform optimally, and all the best users started to defrag their hard disks.
Consider a large library containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of books. Major reference works are often published in a series of volumes. When you need to consult several consecutive volumes of such a work, how they’re stored is critical to the task. If someone has tucked each volume away in a different location within the stack, assembling those you need is going to take a long while. If all its volumes are kept in sequence on a single shelf, that’s far quicker. That’s why fragmentation of data has been so important in computer storage.
The story of defragging on the Mac is perhaps best illustrated in the rise and fall of Coriolis Systems and iDefrag. Coriolis was started in 2004, initially to develop iPartition, a tool for non-destructive re-partitioning of HFS+ disks, but its founder Alastair Houghton was soon offering iDefrag, which became a popular defragging tool. This proved profitable until SSDs became more widespread and Apple released APFS in High Sierra, forcing Coriolis to shut down in 2019, when defragging Macs effectively ceased.
All storage media, including memory, SSDs and rotating hard disks, can develop fragmentation, but most serious attention has been paid to the problem on hard disks. This is because of their electro-mechanical mechanism for seeking to locations on the spinning platter they use for storage. To read a fragmented file sequentially, the read-write head has to keep physically moving to new positions, which takes time and contributes to ageing of the mechanism and eventual failure. Although solid-state media can have slight overhead accessing disparate storage blocks sequentially, this isn’t thought significant and attempts to address that invariably have greater disadvantages.
Fragmentation on hard disks comes in three quite distinct forms: file data across most of the storage, file system metadata, and free space. Different strategies and products have been used to tackle each of those, with varying degrees of success. While few doubt the performance benefits achieved immediately after defragging each of those, little attention has been paid to demonstrating more lasting benefits, which remain more dubious.
Manually defragging HFS+ hard disks was always a questionable activity, as Apple added background defragmentation to Mac OS X 10.2, released two years before Coriolis was even founded. By El Capitan and Sierra that built-in defragging was highly effective, and the need for manual defragging had almost certainly become a popular myth. Neither did many consider the adverse effects on hard disk longevity of those intense periods of disk activity.
The second version of TechTool Pro in 1999 offered a simplified volume map for what it termed optimisation, offering the options to defragment only files, or the whole disk contents including free space.
By the following year, TechTool Pro was paying greater attention to defragging file system metadata, here shown in white. This view was animated during the process of defragmentation, showing its progress in gathering together all the files and free space into contiguous areas. TechTool Pro is still developed and sold by MicroMat, and now in version 20.
A similar approach was adopted by its competitor Speed Disk, here with even more categories of contents.
By 2010, my preferred defragger was Drive Genius 3, shown here working on a 500 GB SATA hard disk, one of four in my desktop Mac; version 6 is still sold by Prosoft. One popular technique for defragmentation with systems like that was to keep one of its four internal disks empty, then periodically clone one of the other disks to that, and clone it back again.
Alsoft’s DiskWarrior is another popular maintenance tool, shown here in 2000. This doesn’t perform conventional defragmentation, but restructures the trees used for file system metadata, and remains an essential tool for anyone maintaining HFS+ disks.
Since switching to APFS on SSDs several years ago, I have missed defragging like a hole in the head.
这是一期 荒野楼阁 WildloG 和 皮蛋漫游记 的串台节目，由我和零号、初号一起，聊聊今年 Apple 发布的新产品以及一些周边的信息，作为 设以观复x两颗皮蛋 合作的那期视频内容的一些补充。
今年 iPhone 16 系列着实挺闹心的，一方面是 Apple Intelligence 的大饼迟迟未能落地，另一方面 Camera Control 独立按键加得有点莫名其妙。但我们还是决定在深入体验和使用 iPhone 16系列之后，能够匹配我们的深度测评内容一起，跟大家聊聊今年库克又挤出来了多少牙膏？
Although birth hasn’t proved such a popular theme in paintings, there are countless depictions of death. Dominant among them in European works are those of the Crucifixion, but in this brief survey I concentrate on those showing figures from myth, history and contemporary life, particularly those of deathbed scenes, and omit religious paintings entirely.
Adonis is perhaps the only figure whose birth and death have been popular in paintings. Following his strange birth from the myrrh tree, when he was a young adult he bled to death after he had been gored by a wild boar while he was hunting.
Hendrik Goltzius (1558–1617), Dying Adonis (1609), oil on canvas, 76.5 × 76.5 cm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.
Hendrik Goltzius’ startlingly foreshortened projection of the Dying Adonis from 1609 pushes his face and head into the distance and makes their features almost unreadable, while his feet take pride of place and you can even read their soles.
Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521), A Satyr mourning over a Nymph (or The Death of Procris) (c 1495), oil on poplar wood, 65.4 × 184.2 cm, The National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.
Piero di Cosimo’s wonderful painting of a dying nymph uses the full width of a panoramic panel to show a satyr with his goat legs and distinctive ears, ministering to the nymph, who has a severe wound in her throat. At her feet is a hunting dog, with another three in the distance. Sometimes claimed to show the death of Procris by a javelin thrown by her husband Cephalus, this tells a different and unidentified story.
The death of Dido is more easy to identify, particularly in this depiction by Henry Fuseli, from 1781.
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), Dido (1781), oil on canvas, 244.3 x 183.4 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.
Dido has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and the eventual founding of Rome.
The story of lovers Pyramus and Thisbe and their tragic deaths has been popular with painters since classical times. When they arrange to meet outside the city, she flees from a lioness, leaving her bloodied cloak. He then arrives and assumes that she has been killed by the lioness and falls on his sword. She returns to find him dying, and falls on his sword so they can be reunited in death. Their spilt blood turns the fruit of the mulberry bush from white to red.
Artist not known, Pyramus and Thisbe (before 79 CE), wall painting, dimensions not known, House of Loreius Tiburtinus, Pompeii, Italy. Image by Wilson Delgado and Escarlati, via Wikimedia Commons.
This version from the ruins of Pompeii includes all the main cues, with the lioness in the distance, and a mulberry tree with its white fruit. Its composition has remained in use for the two millennia since then.
More recent legends, particularly those of King Arthur, have formed the basis for some notable painted deathbed scenes.
James Archer (1823–1904), The Death of King Arthur (c 1860), oil on canvas, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
In James Archer’s The Death of King Arthur from about 1860, the dying Arthur is surrounded by four women, as the black boat approaches the beach behind them. At the right, the ghostly figure of an angel holding a chalice is materialising, in accordance with Sir Thomas Malory’s popular literary account.
Many historical figures have been portrayed in their final moments.
Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), The Death of Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1828), oil on canvas, 422 x 343 cm, Musée du Louvre. Wikimedia Commons.
In Paul Delaroche’s Death of Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1828) the haggard queen is shown slumped on a makeshift bed on the floor, putting her low in the painting. Her maids and other female attendants are in distress behind her, supporting the pillows on which her head rests. I presume that the male kneeling by the queen and extending his right hand towards her is Robert Cecil, leader of the government at the time, and behind him are other members of the Privy Council of England, who were shortly to install Elizabeth’s successor.
Benjamin West (1738–1820), The Death of General Wolfe (1770), oil on canvas, 151 × 213 cm, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON. Wikimedia Commons.
Benjamin West’s best-known painting of The Death of General Wolfe (1770) shows a scene from an almost uniquely brief battle between British and French forces on 13 September 1759, which lasted only an hour or so. At the end of their three months siege of the French city of Quebec, Canada, British forces under the command of General Wolfe were preparing to take the city by force. The French attacked the British line on a plateau just outside the city.
Within minutes, Wolfe suffered three gunshot wounds, and died quickly. The French commander, General Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, was also hit by a musket ball, and died the following morning. The British line held, and the French were forced to evacuate the city, ultimately leading to France ceding most of its possessions in North America to Britain, in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Wolfe’s death was quickly seen as the ultimate sacrifice of a commander in securing victory, West’s underlying theme here.
Just over twenty years later, it was the turn of the French Revolution to provide a more equivocal hero.
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Marat Assassinated (1793), oil on canvas, 165 x 128 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Wikimedia Commons.
On the morning of 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Normandy, turned up at the Paris house of Jean-Paul Marat, one of Revolution’s most influential radicals, asking to see him; his fiancée turned her away. She gained entry later that evening, and started giving him the names of some local counter-revolutionaries. While he was writing them down, she drew a kitchen knife with a 15 cm (6 inch) blade from her clothing, and plunged it into Marat’s chest, killing him rapidly.
David’s famous painting shows Marat’s body slumped over the side of his bath, the murder weapon and his quill both on the floor, the pen still in his right hand, and a handwritten note in his left hand. Corday was executed in public by guillotine on 17 July. Marat became a martyr for the cause, after his friend David had organised one of the spectacular funerals for which he had become known.
Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), The Death of Théodore Géricault (1824), oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
When Théodore Géricault, who had painted The Raft of the Medusa in 1818-19, died in Paris on 26 January 1824, the young and promising history painter Ary Scheffer painted his tribute as The Death of Théodore Géricault (1824). At the artist’s bedside are his close friends Colonel Bro de Comères and the painter Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy, and the wall of the room is covered by his paintings.
Claude Monet (1840–1926), Camille Monet on her Deathbed (1879), oil on canvas, 90 x 68 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
When Claude Monet’s first wife was dying in the late summer of 1879, he painted his tribute to her in Camille Monet on her Deathbed (1879). She appears to be surrounded by diaphanous feathers that rise on either side of her head to form angelic wings. She was only 32, and they had two children.
Edvard Munch (1863–1944), By the Deathbed (1895), oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm, Bergen kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway. Wikimedia Commons.
By the Deathbed (1895) is Edvard Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist wasn’t quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details that he no longer saw. This explains its relative simplicity.
Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is their mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.
Marià Fortuny (1838–1874), Miss Del Castillo on her Deathbed (1871), oil on canvas, 57 x 70.5 cm, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.
Like Manet and the French Impressionists, Marià Fortuny painted motifs that challenged social attitudes of the day. His portrait of Miss Del Castillo on her Deathbed from 1871 shows a similar scene to Monet’s later painting above.
Sometimes, deathbed and other posthumous portraits prove too great a challenge.
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), Ria Munk on her Deathbed (1917-18), oil on canvas, 50 × 50.5 cm, Private collection. Image courtesy of Richard Nagy Ltd, London, via Wikimedia Commons.
Maria Munk, known as Ria, had been engaged to the actor and writer Hanns Heinz Ewers; when he called off their engagement, she committed suicide just after Christmas in 1911, by shooting herself in the chest. Gustav Klimt was commissioned by Ria’s family to paint a posthumous portrait of her, and first made Ria Munk on her Deathbed, initially completed in 1912 but here dated to 1917-18. She is manifestly dead, and surrounded by floral tributes. The family rejected the work, finding it too distressing, and asked Klimt to depict her when she had still been alive, from photographs.
A second portrait completed in 1916 was also rejected, although there’s doubt about the identity of the painting, and the reason for its rejection. Klimt started his third attempt in 1917, and was still working on it early the following year. It was clearly going to be one of his richly decorated paintings, with abundant colourful flowers in the background, and brilliant peppers and other vegetables. In early January 1918, Klimt caught the deadly influenza that had just started to spread across Europe. He quickly developed pneumonia, suffered a stroke, and died on 6 February 1918.
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.
Jules Breton (1827–1906), The Gleaners (1854), oil on canvas, 93 × 138 cm, The National Gallery of Ireland/Gailearaí Náisiúnta na hÉireann, Dublin, Ireland. The Athenaeum.
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 (1814–1875), The Gleaners (1857), oil on canvas, 83.5 × 110 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
Jules Breton (1827–1906), Calling in the Gleaners (1859), oil on canvas, 90 x 176 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
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 (1844–1925), Gleaners (1887), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942), Cowed (1887), media not known, 126 x 152.3 cm, Fyns Kunstmuseum, Odense, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), The Gleaners (1889), oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. WikiArt.
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.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912), oil on canvas, 89.5 × 128.9 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Lhermitte’s Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) shows a group of women gleaning, two of them almost bent double.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaning Women (1920), oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.2 cm, National Museum of Western Art 国立西洋美術館 (Kokuritsu seiyō bijutsukan), Tokyo, Japan. Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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