With the autumn/fall fast approaching, in much of the northern hemisphere the harvest is reaching its conclusion. Although most traditionally painted as the grain harvest, even more nutritionally important are the fruit crops. This weekend I concentrate on paintings of the fruit harvest, from apples to plums, and plenty of grapes to turn into wine.

While Ceres, with her strong associations with cereals, was the goddess of the harvest, the classical European civilisations were well aware of the importance of fruit, and linked them with a rich mythology from Bacchus and Cybele (the Romans’ Magna Mater) to cornucopias.

Leandro Bassano’s Allegory of the Element Earth from about 1580 is a copy of a work originally painted by his better-known father Jacopo. With the foreground full of the fruit of the earth, and a child up a ladder still picking more, in the distant sky is Cybele in her chariot drawn by lions.

Nicolas Poussin’s reference to a story from the Book of Numbers in Autumn (1660-64) shows Israelite spies who first visited the Promised Land returning with grapes as evidence of what lay ahead. Behind them is a picker up another ladder, reaching for apples.

Although the social realists of the nineteenth century most frequently painted the cereal harvest and gleaning, Jules Breton also painted the harvest of grapes and figs.

In 1862, Breton started work on a new commission, for the Comte Duchâtel, of a major work showing the grape harvest on his vineyards in Médoc, Bordeaux. Breton made a series of studies and photographs in preparation, including this Two Young Women Picking Grapes (1862). Unfortunately I’ve been unable to locate a usable image of the finished painting, The Vintage at Château Lagrange, which Breton completed in 1864 and exhibited at the Salon that year.

At the time, Château Lagrange was classified as one of the fourteen great Troisièmes Crus of Bordeaux, and the Comte Duchâtel, whose château appears in the distance, was considered the master of a great wine. However, the purpose of Breton’s painting was clearly not to promote the wine or even the Comte: it was to accompany his original painting of The Weeders (1860), which the Comte had bought from him.

Breton painted The Fig Picker (1873) in Brittany, where figs were a traditional fruit crop. The climate there is mild and moist, and since their probable introduction by the Romans, several suitable varieties have been developed. The picker wears a capacious apron to contain the crop, and her sickle rests on the ground near her feet.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Winslow Homer’s watercolour of Apple Picking from 1878 is enriched by sunlight.

Léon Lhermitte brought this scene of an Apple Market, Landerneau, Brittany (c 1878) to life with his detailed realism. With a cart on the move in the background, and sellers ready with their scales, it shows the small-scale bustle of an otherwise quiet country town.

In Lhermitte’s Grape Harvest from 1884 there’s the lifting smile of a mother as she watches her young boy eating the grapes. Behind and to the left, though, the work of the harvest goes on, and looks particularly back-breaking.

Three Little Girls Picking Blackberries from about 1885 may appear almost sickly sweet like the fruit of its hedgerow, but has a harder story to tell beneath Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s wonderfully loose brushstrokes. For children like these girls, picking berries in the late summer wasn’t just fun. Despite their clean hair and folk dress, the fruits of the hedgerows were an essential part of their diet, and would be eked out in jams and conserves over the coming winter.

Just as Camille Pissarro’s style was becoming increasingly Divisionist, he chose two memorable views of the apple harvest.

Pissarro had started to paint this large studio work Apple-Picking in 1881, but ran into problems with its size and composition, and didn’t complete it until early in 1886. Meanwhile, he completed a similar composition in distemper as early as 1882. This later oil version was one of his works shown at the eighth Impressionist Exhibition, where its unusual square canvas and more Divisionist style proved popular with the critics.

However, that didn’t translate into a sale. In July, Pissarro passed it to Durand-Ruel for sale at 3,000 Francs, but it remained unsold. The artist then arranged for Georges Petit, who was more sympathetic to Divisionism, to take it on but he too was unsuccessful. After that, Pissarro became curiously uncertain as to what should become of it: in 1889, when Théo van Gogh was interested in trying to sell it, Pissarro refused, and it remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death.

Pissarro became more overtly Divisionist in his Apple Picking, Éragny, which was largely completed in the autumn of 1887. One of the canonical works of Neo-Impressionism, it was exhibited to favourable reviews at the Cercle de XX in Brussels in 1889.

In 1891, towards the end of her sadly short career, Berthe Morisot painted young women up a ladder, picking cherries. The work above appears the more finished, and that below looks to have been more of a study, perhaps.

Tomorrow we’ll be ascending some more ladders in search of later fruit.