For countless generations, since humans first started farming the land, improving the soil and fields has been a constant task. Once the plough has passed, there’s still work to be done in many areas, where there are stones mixed in the soil. This has been the burden of those who have worked the land, and has been featured in occasional paintings.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Worn Out (1889) follows in the Naturalist tradition of Jules Bastien-Lepage. An old man has collapsed when working in the fields. A younger woman, his daughter perhaps, is giving him aid and shouting for all she’s worth to summon assistance. The soil around them is poor, and full of flints; the two were engaged in the toil of the poorest of the poor, picking out the large stones and putting them into piles for collection. It’s backbreaking work for the young, and clearly proved too much for this man.

Once ploughed to a fine tilth and rid of its stones, the soil is ready for the seed of the next crop, accomplished by manual broadcasting, a term in common use long before it came to be applied to radio then TV transmissions.

Sowing is one of the basic tasks in arable farming, and one at the heart of the changes that took place between 1600 and 1900. Broadcasting is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient in use of seed, making it one of the first tasks for attempts to mechanise farming. Although early types of seed drill had been tried before, it’s Jethro Tull, an English gentleman farmer from the early eighteenth century, who has generally been credited with inventing the first successful seed drill, in 1701. Today his name is better-known as that of one of the great rock bands formed in 1967.

Alongside the use of a seed drill was the requirement for a horse hoe, a light and small plough drawn by a single horse, to ensure the seed was well covered by soil. Unfortunately, early drills proved too fragile for general use, and it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that metal could be turned to manufacture more durable drills, that became widespread across Western Europe during the rest of that century. However, contemporary painting continued to show sowers still broadcasting seed.

The first of these is Jean-François Millet’s The Sower, completed in 1850, shown at the Salon that year and now recognised as his first real masterpiece. It shows an agricultural worker striding across a field, broadcasting seed for the summer’s crop. In the distance to the right, and caught in the sunlight, is another worker harrowing with a pair of oxen. This was being used to ensure the seed sown was covered with soil, and not exposed to the flurry of birds trying to eat any seed left on the surface.

Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier, here with two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. That above is now in the Walters, and that below in the Clark. These feature a different background, including the tower of Chailly, harrowing using a pair of horses, and a swirling flock of crows in the sky.

By the late nineteenth century, manual broadcasting was becoming less common as farms turned to seed drills, but the image of the sower continued to appear in paintings.

The title of Hans Thoma’s Säender Bauer (1886) apparently means Sowing Framer (thanks to Gregory for his accurate translation). A sower in Millet’s tradition is at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour. Two years later, when he was living in Arles in November 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his version of The Sower.

Millet’s influence is also manifest in the first of Albin Egger-Lienz’s versions of The Sower, from 1903, a motif which was to recur in his later works. Its earth colours, increasing looseness, and emphasis on simplicity were to set the style for much of the rest of his career.

Laurits Andersen Ring admired Millet’s social realism, and would undoubtedly have seen at least one of Millet’s depictions of this motif. In 1910, Ring painted this, The Sower, in such great detail that you can see every seed frozen in mid-air. This suggests that he may have been influenced by photography, the first means of producing such images.

Ring’s friend and contemporary Hans Andersen Brendekilde responded in 1914 with A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church. This is thought to show Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on the island of Sjælland (Zealand), close to where Brendekilde was born and from where he had taken his name. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

This motif seems to have long outlasted the practice of broadcasting. By 1900, even gardeners and smallholders were being offered mechanical seed drills. As those used less than a third of the seed than broadcasting, it’s hard to see any farmer in the early twentieth century still preferring traditional methods.

With the young plants growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, another laborious and back-breaking task often assigned to women.

The Weeders (1868) is a smaller variant of a painting of the same name that Jules Breton made in 1860, which was acclaimed when exhibited in the Salon the following year and the Exposition Universelle in 1867. Set in the fields just outside Courrières, the labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the last moment that there is insufficient light for them to work any longer. Breton wrote of their faces encircled by the pink transparency of their violet bonnets, as if worshipping the life-giving star.

Although only peasants, the light transforms these women into classical beauties, an observation made by the critics at the time. This gives rise to a phenomenon repeated across Breton’s panoramas of country work, in which these classical figures appear in thoroughly socially-realist landscapes, showing their sanctity in labour.

Jakub Schikaneder’s Weeder (1887) shows a woman bent double as she pulls weeds from a young crop, and would pass for a social realist work from the likes of Millet or Breton.

Following the relatively light relief of the tale of Lycian peasants turned into frogs, Ovid’s Metamorphoses briefly covers the horrific story of Marsyas, adding an odd intercalation about Pelops. Ovid links to this story through Latona: the twins born to her in Lycia were Diana and Apollo, and this is about the divine retribution of the latter.

Marsyas was a satyr who became an outstanding player of the aulos, a double-piped reed instrument termed here Minerva’s flute, although not a flute at all. This refers to the myth of Minerva’s ‘invention’ and pioneering of the instrument.

In 1877, Elihu Vedder had been thinking about the myth of Marsyas. Rather than show the contest with Apollo or its grim consequence, Vedder reasoned that Marsyas must have proved his skill with the aulos before the challenge arose. His conclusion was that the satyr might have been charming hares, leading him to paint Young Marsyas or Marsyas Enchanting the Hares (1878). Vedder shows a young Marsyas in the snows of the New England winter, surrounded by the enchanted hares.

Marsyas and Apollo took part in a contest against one another to determine who was the better player. Judged by the Muses, Apollo inevitably won, his prize being to treat the loser in any way that he wished. Apollo chose to flay Marsyas alive, inflicting the most gruesome, painful, and horrific death that he could have devised. Ovid provides a short but graphic description of the satyr’s body becoming one huge wound, and the tears of all around, particularly other satyrs and fauns, whose weeping created a new river in Phrygia, named after Marsyas.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Apollo and Marsyas from 1541-42 shows the contest, but leaves its outcome to the viewer’s imagination. Apollo is on the left, holding an anachronistic violin, as Marsyas on the right plays his pipe.

From that simple motif, Tintoretto developed his later Contest of Apollo and Marsyas in 1544-45. This reiterates his previous motif at the left, with the addition of a small audience consisting of a token Grace, as judge, and three men. This was commissioned in 1544 by Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), a major literary figure of the time and close friend of Tintoretto’s rival Titian. Aretino was a successful satirist and early writer of pornography, who later became a successful blackmailer.

Cornelius van Poelenburgh takes us into the myth itself, showing The Musical Contest between Apollo and Marsyas (1630). Marsyas is to the right of centre, with two other satyrs behind him. Apollo, wearing a crown of laurels both as his attribute and possibly an indication of his victory in the contest, is holding forth from a rocky throne to the right. At the left are the Muses, the jury for the contest, with another couple of satyrs. There’s also a mystery couple, seen walking away in the distance to the left of Marsyas’ right leg.

Tiepolo’s Apollo and Marsyas (1720-22) also takes the contest as its theme. It’s easy here to mistake the figure sat on the rock throne as being Apollo, but he’s actually the youth at the left, bearing his lyre, wearing a wreath of laurel, and given a gentle divine halo. Thus the figure apparently wearing a gold crown sat in a dominant position must be Marsyas, clutching a flute of sorts in his right hand. To the right are some of the Muses, one of whom covers her eyes in despair. She knows what Apollo’s pointing arm is about to inflict on the usurper Marsyas.

Apollo and Marsyas (1886) is Hans Thoma’s depiction of the contest, with Marsyas playing, and only three of the Muses in the background. Although not a strongly narrative painting, as it makes no reference to the outcome, this was probably more appreciated by contemporary viewers.

By far the most famous painting of the flaying itself is one of Titian’s last great works: The Flaying of Marsyas from about 1570-1576. The satyr has been strung up by his legs from a tree, his arms also bound, and is now having his skin and hide cut off, Apollo kneeling at the left with his blade at Marsyas’ chest. Standing above the god is one of the Muses, playing her string instrument and gazing upwards. Near her left hand are Pan pipes rather than an aulos, strung from the tree next to the satyr’s body. At the right, another satyr has brought a pail of water. Others gaze on in dismay at the grisly scene.

Bronzino’s The Flaying of Marsyas (1531-32) summarises the tragedy in its multiplex narrative. At the right, the contest is taking place, with a very human Marsyas playing a wind instrument resembling a clarinet, which is at least a reed instrument like the aulos.

In the left distance, Apollo subdues the defeated Marsyas and binds him. Supervising this is a goddess, who appears to be Minerva, with a shield and spear, who first ‘invented’ and played the aulos. In the centre, Apollo is flaying the satyr, who is here neither bound nor suspended from a tree. The figure in the left foreground may be Olympus, who is expressing his grief.

The subject of mourning leads Ovid back to mention Amphion and his wife Niobe, who was mourned by Pelops. The latter was subject of a well-known myth in which Tantalus, his father, killed him and dismembered the body, then served it up to the gods to test their omniscience. Ceres, still distracted by the rape of Proserpine, ate Pelops’ shoulder. When the gods reconstituted Pelops and brought him back to life, a piece of ivory was fashioned into a replacement shoulder for him. Mercifully, I’m not aware of any painting by a major artist that attempts to depict this story.