Summer Landscape with Figures

Summer is harvest time, with peasants busy in the fields, but this evocation of small-town life includes moments of leisure. A man on the riverbank fishes, while a woman bathes beneath the bridge. A man crossing the bridge, raising his hat before the wayside cross, may be a wealthier citizen of the town; he carries a long-barreled gun and may be setting forth to hunt. A darker mood prevails in the middle distance, where peasants with scythes cut wheat: a man pushes a woman to the ground to have his way with her, as her child waves his arms in consternation, an episode ignored by the others. The impression of a hard, inexorable life cycle is reinforced by a gallows with a hanging man in the distance, while a wheel and cross raised aloft on poles testify to other cruel methods of execution.