About a dozen women and men, all with pale or suntanned skin, work in a field harvesting grain in this horizontal painting. The women wear long skirts and aprons, and some wear cloths tied around their heads. The men wear long-sleeved shirts rolled up to the elbow and long pants.
Closest to us and to our right of center, a woman stands facing our left in profile, holding a large, round sieve. Her dark hair is pulled back, and she wears a gold-colored, teardrop-shaped earring in the ear we can see. The sleeves of her white blouse are rolled up and a teal-blue apron is tied over a brown, ankle-length skirt above bare feet. Black seed pours from the sieve, which she holds in front of her with arms wide, onto a cloth below. To our left, a woman wearing a dark skirt, a white shirt, and a red head covering kneels on the cloth and scoops the black seed into a bucket. Next to her, a girl wearing a brown dress sits on the cloth and watches the seed cascade down as she holds a baby or a doll in her lap. One white bag stands upright behind the woman holding the sieve, while a second bag has been depleted. A brass-colored tea kettle sits between the bags with a vessel, possibly ceramic. Vivid red flowers in that area could be a patch of poppies in the field.
A woman behind this group, to our right, wraps a big bundle of stalks in a blue sack while another woman, to our left, carries a bundle of the rapeseed stalks balanced on her head with both hands. A group of men beyond her work in a circle, holding long scythes with straight blades overhead. Another woman kneels with her back to us and others work, hunched over, around the men.
The field is enclosed by band of pine-green trees surrounding houses and barns. Gray clouds cover much of the pale blue sky above. The artist signed and dated the work in dark paint in the lower left corner: “Jules Breton Courrieres 1860.”
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