Women Tending their Fields

Woman and her Tractor

Pictured above is an iron wrought painting framed in dark wood with a green border. Within the painting, a woman is depicted in the foreground riding a tractor and tending to her fields. In the background, we can see a man reclining on the grass and talking to a young woman while shaded by a tree. While large empty spaces are used here, here it is used to represent the freshly tilled field instead of the infinite beyond (which would often be used to symbolize political uncertainty within Southern Song Dynasty landscape paintings).

It is interesting to note that within the painting, the roles typically expected of men and women are reversed. Here, the woman is working hard, and taking on the typically masculine role of doing labor intensive farm and field work, while the man in the background is simply relaxing, and letting the woman take care of all the hard work.