On 15 February 1566, within a year of the paint drying, the Antwerp merchant banker Nicolaes Jonghelinck signed a guarantee for sixteen thousand guilders on behalf of a friend named Daniel de Bruyne. The security he put up was his pictures: sixteen Bruegels, this one among them.
Six panels, twelve months
Jonghelinck had commissioned a set of paintings of the farming year for his country house outside Antwerp. The records describe six pictures covering the twelve months, so each panel carries two: this is the pair that holds August and September, the wheat harvest.
Five of the six survive. Three are in Vienna, one is in Prague, and this one is in New York. The panel for April and May — spring, the one you would expect to have been the prettiest — is gone, and nobody knows when or how.
The 1566 guarantee lists what else was on the wall of that house: a Tower of Babel, a Christ carrying the cross, the twelve months, and the rest of them whatever they might be. Sixteen Bruegels in one private room, four years before Jonghelinck died, pledged in a single document because a friend needed a signature.
Nothing holy happens
That is the odd thing about it for 1565. There is no saint, no myth, no lesson and no story. The subject is wheat, and the people cutting it, and the hour of the day.
Nine of them have stopped to eat under a pear tree. One woman is working her way through bread and cheese. Three men are still swinging scythes at the standing corn, a line of women carry sheaves on their shoulders along a corridor cut through the field, and one man has gone completely — flat on his back under the tree, legs apart, hat off, asleep in front of everybody.
He is the most famous person in the painting. He is also, as far as anybody can point to, one of the first people in European art painted asleep on his lunch break for no reason except that this is what people do at noon in August.
What happened to the set
The panel has grown slightly since Bruegel finished it. The Metropolitan Museum's measurements put the surface he painted at 116.5 by 159.5 centimetres, and the panel as it hangs at 119 by 162, because strips were added later along the top, the bottom and the right-hand edge.
In 1594 the city of Antwerp bought the six paintings for one thousand four hundred guilders and gave them away, as a present to Archduke Ernest of Austria. From him they went to Rudolf II, then to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, which is why three of them hang in Vienna today.
This one came loose from the group, turned up on the market, and was bought by the Metropolitan Museum in 1919. It has been a civic gift, a diplomatic present and a line in a banker's guarantee. It has never not been somebody's asset.
In February 1566 it was security on a friend's debt: a harvest, a pear tree and a man flat on his back. Nothing is owed on it now.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.