The Harvesters, by the Flemish artist Peter Brogel the Elder,

Painted 1565, hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and today we're going to take a walk

through it and if you have a computer tablet or phone handy you can follow along.

I'm Kathy Fitzgerald and this is moving pictures, a new three-part series on the BBC World Service. Each week we're going to spend half an hour taking a long slow look at a work of art.

You'll find a link to the painting on the Moving Pictures page of the BBC World Service website.

Follow the link and you'll be taken to a super high-resolution photograph of

the Harvesters made by Google Arts and Culture. Once you're there, click on the

painting to zoom in and in and in. You can see more than you can

can with the naked eye, the thread veins of tiny cracks in the paint, individual brush strokes, the smallest

details, half hidden by the artist. When I listen to the painting, what do I hear? Do I hear the wind?

I can see some birds, so I guess that I hear the birds singing.

The people working with the size just across the field, it must have been a lot of noise there too.

You're on a hillside covered in golden wheat, chest high, dry and rasping in the breeze. The heat haze hovers on the far horizon.

It's harvest time.

The cut wheat lies on the ground around your feet,

waiting for workers to bind it into sheaves.

A small group of harvesters have stopped to rest in the shade of a pear tree.

A man in a white shirt lies stretched out on the stubble

beside the tree trunk. Mouth open, head cushioned by an arm and his red doublet perhaps. He's

deep in sleep. Beside him the other peasants sit in a

tight circle resting on chiefs of wheat. If they were seasonal workers they would start already at 4 or 5 o'clock at the morning when it's getting a little bit light outside and they would be working until 9 o'clock in the evening, maybe even 10 o'clock in the evening.

Hildee Soofs is responsible for the Open Air Museum in Botkrick, Belgium, which shows visitors

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