In this chapter we focus on farming, horticulture, fruit production and tree and woodland management, especially that of pines and chestnuts, and the ways in which artists and writers represented these. Agricultural land and the people who worked it appear in written accounts of travel as well as in drawings and paintings made on the spot. At the end of the eighteenth century Arthur Young cast the professional eye of an agronomist over such matters, dispensing praise and blame as he went. Others, most especially amateur artists, appreciated the aesthetic impressions made by peasants and the tools they used in the fields. Elizabeth Fanshawe, travelling around Europe with her sisters Penelope and Catherine Maria between 1828 and 1830, sketched several groups of peasant women by the roadside. Plate XIII shows three pairs of women they encountered on the journey north from the Po Valley to the Alps. The two on the left are ‘Carrying Fowls to the market of Arona’ on Lake Maggiore: one is holding fowls and a basket, the other is carrying live ducks on the top of goods in the large basket, or gerla, on her back. In the centre, labelled ‘Costume di Oleggio’, two bare-footed women are hoeing the soil with the traditional vanga in a crop of maize, but the main focus is the colour and style of their costumes. On the right are women from near Domodossola, where, again, the costumes are carefully drawn and coloured. Another of Fanshawe’s sketches shows women driving pigs to market and hoeing near Mortara in the Po Valley. Again, details of the costume are depicted carefully and the working landscape is more sketchily represented; nevertheless, we get a good feel for what women actually did in the fields at this time.

Some artists represented working men, quite often in the act of herding their flocks of sheep and goats. Randolph Caldecott (1846–1886), a professional artist more famous in his day as a humorous cartoonist than a landscape painter, produced several landscapes during a trip to the Ligurian Riviera in the winter of 1876–1877 to improve his health.