Charles Philogène Tschaggeny (1815-1894) began his career in the service of the Belgian government. It was in Brussels in 1845 that the artist first drew critical attention when his painting The Labourer at Rest earned him a gold medal and the patronage of Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865). From 1848, Tschaggeny was employed in London and, for two years in Oxford, where his commissions were dominated by representations of horses.

This landscape was exhibited at the Great Industrial Exhibition held in Dublin in 1853, the first of several events to be modelled on the success of the Great Exhibition (1851) and funded at the sole expense of the railway tycoon William Dargan, a man who so impressed Queen Victoria that she ‘would have made him a baronet’. The Queen, the Prince Consort and the Prince of Wales paid an official visit to the event on 29 August although they visited the exhibition four times in total.

Under a summer sky a group of harvesters load sheaves of wheat onto a cart, drawn by four horses. One labourer hoists the harvest onto the vehicle with a pitchfork whilst a second, standing precariously on top of the bounty, balances the sheaves in an orderly fashion. In the background the figures of the gleaners can be seen gathering the few scattered stalks remaining from those felled by the reapers. Three small children rest in the shade of a large bale of hay. A dog – exhausted by the heat – lies in the grass in the foreground. The bare, flat (though fertile) landscape and heavy figures convey an image of rural labour which may be somewhat idealised but is certainly not picturesque; in this it may be influenced by Jean-François Millet's Haymakers Resting of 1848 (Musée D'Orsay) and Sower of 1850 (Boston, MFA).