The "Harvesters" is an oil painting on wood by which famous artist?

"The Harvesters" is an oil painting on wood completed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–1530 –1569) in 1565. He was the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting.

The panel shown belongs to a series, commissioned by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck for his suburban home. The "Months of the Year" cycle originally included 6 paintings showing the times of the year. Apart from "The Harvesters", which is usually identified as representing late summer, 4 other paintings of the group have survived namely "The Hunters in the Snow", "The Hay Harvest", "The Gloomy Day" and "The Return of the Herd".

Bruegel’s series is a watershed in the history of western art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls this painting the “first modern landscape”. The religious pretext for landscape painting has been suppressed in favour of a new humanism, and the unidealized description of the local scene is based on natural observations.

As in many of his paintings, the focus is on peasants and their work. The painting shows many activities representative of the 16th-century Belgian rural life. For example, shaking apples from the trees and villagers participating in the blood sport of cock throwing. A sense of distance is conveyed by the workers carrying sheaves of wheat through the clearing, the people bathing in the pond, the children playing and the ships far away.

The painting has been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City since 1919.