Peter Hansen

Oxen Threshing. Cività d’Antino

The picture is a Southern European variation on one of Peter Hansen’s major Danish works, The Ploughman Turns (1900-1902). Time and time again the visiting Danish painters showed the Italian rural population in harvest scenes, for example, and especially, as in this picture, from the threshing in Cività d’Antino. For Peter Hansen and the other Funen Painters the motif offered the dream of an “ordinary, cheerful, active life” in freedom and in harmony with nature, as a contrast to corrupted modern city life. The peasant in Hansen’s art should therefore be seen, rather than as an expression of political agitation, as an emblem of a vitalistic view of life that gives pride of place to the notion of the healthy and natural. The peasant girl in the picture easily and dexterously manipulates the four big oxen, and judging from her facial expression the work seems to go off like a game. She has unembarrassedly tied up her dress so that the underskirt can be seen, which in 1904 – when the picture was painted – would quite certainly have been viewed as an expression of her unconstrained, bold charm, and so all in all she strikes the fundamental note of Peter Hansen’s art.