A man sleeps under a pear tree, his friends eat bread and porridge, and the wheat stands taller than the people who cut it. Bruegel's The Harvesters of 1565 is one of the first paintings to make ordinary work in a landscape its whole subject.

Carl Larsson turned his family home at Sundborn into Sweden's best-known domestic picture. His Christmas scenes show the warm side of Nordic light.

TL;DR: Some paintings are built to be read slowly. Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan Steen filled their festival scenes with dozens of figures, each caught in a separate small action, so the eye keeps moving and new details keep surfacing. To read a crowded painting, start with the whole composition, find an anchor figure, follow the hands, name the objects, and ask what has just happened. This guide applies that method to three sixteenth and seventeenth century masterpieces.