After losing his brother to cancer in 2008 Patrick Bringley quit his job in the editorial events office at the New Yorker magazine and spent the next decade as a guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Patrick Bringley, 'All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me', 2022:
"...Looking back, it makes me think of Pieter Bruegel’s great painting The Harvesters. In that picture, a handful of peasants take their afternoon meal against the backdrop of a wide, deep landscape. There is a church in the mid-ground, a harbor behind, gold-green fields rolling back toward a distant horizon. Closer to the picture plane, men mow the grain with scythes and a woman bends low to bundle it. And at the nearest corner of the foreground, these nine peasants—comical and sympathetic—have broken from their labor to sit and sup beneath a pear tree.
Looking at Bruegel’s masterpiece I sometimes think: here is a painting of literally the most commonplace thing on earth. Most people have been farmers. Most of these have been peasants. Most lives have been labor and hardship punctuated by rest and the enjoyment of others. It is a scene that must have been so familiar to Pieter Bruegel it took an effort to notice it. But he did notice it. And he situated this little, sacred, ragtag group at the fore of his vast, outspreading world.
I am sometimes not sure which is the more remarkable: that life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life."
Pieter Bruegel the Elder- The Harvesters 1565
