The Labours of the Months: July

The 12 small pictures in this group show the ‘labours of the months’ – the activities that take place each month throughout the farming year. They were painted on canvas and then each glued to a wooden panel. It is possible that they were made to decorate the recessed panels of a pair of doors. The paintings seem to have been planned in pairs with the figures facing each other and are currently displayed in two frames in groups of six.In this painting, which we think may represent July, a man threshes the grain from the corn husks and stalks of straw. He holds the corn on a wooden block and strikes it with his wooden flail. The weather is warm and the man is barefoot with no hat on his head. He is a little older than the labourers in the other pictures – some streaks of grey appear in his beard. He kneels outside a small brick building with an overhanging roof supported on two posts. Perhaps it is the same building in which the elderly man in the representation of January sits.At the foot of the blue mountains in the distance we see a fine villa, to which this farmland perhaps belongs.