Grigory Myasoyedov was one of the founders of "The Wanderers" or "Peredvizhniki". They were formally known as the Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions and he was an active contributor and participant of the movement for the rest of his life. He moved to a farm, near a place called Khariv in the Russian countryside in 1876. The purpose of the Peredvizhniki was to provide access to art to everyone and this included the peasant class. Hence, many of his paintings are centred on the lives of the peasants who were often labourers and farmers who worked as a family for landlords.This was because the Wanderers aimed to depict their lives and immortalize it as a part of art as well.
The mastery of this painting lies in the depiction of the golden grain. It has depth and feeling, becoming one of the characters of the painting and moving with the eye of the viewer. The people depicted are working on harvesting with scythes; Russian farmers harvested their crops in the month of August and they mainly harvested buckwheat, oats and peas with a scythe. Their expressions are calm and focussed but also passive. While the mood remains bright and optimistic, owing to the gold of the grain and the contrasting sky blue, the perspective is still that of an outsider or someone passing by. The Peredvizhniki's greatest challenge was to make sure they were not on the outside looking in. However, this is one of the examples where this ideal falls short as they end up showing a mere surface view, lacking of the peasant class's true situation while romanticizing the Russian countryside and its people.
His work "Harvest Time (Scythers)", however, not just shows peasants at their work, but is a celebration of labour and community, of the relation that human beings bear to their lands. From the expansive wheatfield under summer blue sky dotted with wildflowers, to the work of the scythes moving rhythmically as the team of peasant labourers all worked in harmony, the scene is alive with nature and a certain kind of energy. While they work terribly hard here, and you can almost feel their exertion, Myasoyedov paints no sorrow in their labour but presents them a unit. Even the bodies seem organic in how they relate to the space around them.
Indeed this view of work, a positive regard for peasant labour, seems at odds with how, from a nineteenth century Russian perspective, peasant activity was traditionally portrayed; thus even at the Russian Museum it says that "the artist celebrated the collective labour and the joyful life in the countryside of his rural countrymen." To me "Harvest Time" implies that working, honest work enriches us by connecting us together in an old ritual: we connect with our ancestors, with each other, with nature; this harvest becomes not just sustenance but a form of reward.
