Bread is the plainest food a painter can show, and for centuries it was also the one that mattered most. In the pictures here it is broken, carried, blessed and taxed. A baker's bill for it was once paid off in paintings, and a Surrealist claimed that two baskets of it held the whole history of painting.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
For most Europeans before 1900, bread was the food of every day. A loaf showed what a household could afford and who had baked it. In Christian art it could also stand for the body of Christ, the bread consecrated at Mass.
It was a test of skill as well. A loaf has two surfaces, a hard, uneven crust and a soft, pale crumb, and making both look real takes a sure hand.
So the bread in each picture here had to do something: be broken, handed over, carried, paid for or blessed, or hold the eye of the whole composition. A loaf lying unnoticed among other food was not enough. Read in order, the loaves travel back and forth between the altar and the kitchen.
12. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565)
Under a pear tree at the edge of a wheat field, in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Harvesters, a basket of bread waits while a farm worker in gray twists around to cut into a loaf. His companions are already eating around a white cloth set with pears. A woman in a wide triangular hat slices a huge wheel of cheese, others drink a milky porridge straight from their bowls, and three of them look out of the picture as they chew.
This lunch break was painted for a city man. The Harvesters belongs to a set of six panels that Bruegel made in 1565 for Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a merchant banker and collector in Antwerp, each one covering a stretch of the farming year. The landscape is invented, but its details come from Flanders, where Bruegel lived.
In that Flanders, bread was the center of every meal, and everything else came second. The food historian Linda Civitello sums up the sixteenth-century table in a single question: "Do we have anything to go with the bread?" These workers have plenty, with cheese, pears and a porridge probably made from wheat as well.
The wheat standing in the field is the same food at an earlier stage, and it fills the rest of the picture. Behind the group it stands as tall as the men cutting it. Some swing scythes, others rake the stalks and tie them into sheaves set upright in rows. All of it is next year's bread, which is why the harvest was the busiest moment of the farming calendar. A failed one meant hunger, and in the worst years famine.
Bruegel kept that threat out of the painting. He seems to have played down the hardship of the work to please his wealthy buyer, and the people under the tree are well fed. One of them even sprawls asleep against the trunk, his jerkin rolled into a pillow, a few steps from the basket of bread.
At a Glance
Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (about 1525 to 1569)
Painted: 1565
Medium: Oil on oak
Size: 119 × 162 cm (46.9 × 63.8 in), including strips added at the top, bottom and right
Where to see it: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
About This Painting
Which month does The Harvesters show?
The scene is usually placed in July or August, in the hazy heat of high summer.
Where are the other paintings in Bruegel's series?
Five of the six panels survive. The Gloomy Day, The Hunters in the Snow and The Return of the Herd are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Hay Harvest is in the National Gallery in Prague.
11. Pablo Picasso, Woman with Loaves (1906)
Two heavy loaves ride on the head of the sturdy woman in Pablo Picasso's Woman with Loaves, and she faces forward as stiffly as a statue. Behind her, the ground dissolves into loose shapes of pale terracotta, the color of the soil around a mountain village where he worked one summer. The woman under the loaves did not come from that village, and her rigid pose was not his own invention.