Alive
Painted in the 16th century. A man walks a ploughed slope throwing seed, and the field takes up half the picture. Everyone else has stopped. A group sits on the bank eating. A woman rests against a milk jug. Riders pass on the road, and sheep graze in front of a farmhouse with fresh thatch. The sower is the only one still working, and he is the smallest figure in the field. Nobody has settled on a name for this panel. Image searches turn up no record of it. The closest anyone gets is the circle of Jacob Grimmer, the Antwerp workshop that made the Flemish countryside worth painting on its own. Grimmer sold sets of the four seasons and the twelve months, painted by a big workshop at a standard size. He and Pieter Bruegel the Elder were the same age, and Grimmer took a far cheerier view of country life. He wrote comic verse as well, and belonged to the city's guild of poets.
look closer
One man, mid-stride, scattering seed across a field that fills half the panel. Nothing else in the picture is working this hard.
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