The Parable of the Sower

A vast river valley opens out under a pale sky, and only after taking it in do you notice, down at the lower left, a farmer flinging seed - and beyond him a tiny crowd gathered at the water's edge to hear Christ preach from a boat. The scene illustrates the parable of the sower, whose seed falls on the path, the rocks, the thorns, and the good soil (Matthew 13). Bruegel makes the landscape itself the sermon, dwarfing the holy story within the turning world. Signed and dated 1557, it is among the earliest of his surviving paintings.