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Italian, Venetian, 'The Labours of the Months: July', about 1580

Key facts
Full title The Labours of the Months: July
Artist Italian, Venetian
Series The Labours of the Months
Date made about 1580
Medium and support oil on canvas
Dimensions 13.6 × 10.6 cm
Acquisition credit Layard Bequest, 1916
Inventory number NG3110.1
Location Not on display
Collection Main Collection
Previous owners
The Labours of the Months: July
Italian, Venetian
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This is one of 12 small pictures that together show the ‘labours of the months’ – the activities that take place each month throughout the farming year.

In this painting, which we think may represent July, a man threshes 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 sits in the representation of January. At the foot of the blue mountains in the distance we see a fine villa, to which this farmland perhaps belongs.

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The Labours of the Months

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These 12 small pictures may have been made to decorate the recessed panels of a pair of doors, and seem to have been planned in pairs with the figures facing each other. They show the ‘labours of the months’ – the rural activities that take place each month throughout the year.

They are now framed in two groups of six, arranged in an order which reflects that in other, similar cycles and seems to make sense in relation to the seasons depicted, although we cannot be certain this is the original order.

January: A warmly dressed old man sits by a stove.

February: Trimming stakes with a hatchet.

March: Pruning the vines.

April: A cooper making a barrel.

May: A young man holds two rods.

June: A labourer holds a sheaf of corn he has cut with his scythe.

July: A labourer threshes grain with a flail.

August: Exhausted from fruit picking, a labourer sleeps beneath a tree.

September: The vines are harvested and the grapes pressed.

October: The field is ploughed.

November: A hunter with his hawk and hounds.

December: Slaughtering a pig.