In this small painting, women dressed in peasant clothes are harvesting corn. More than half of the painting is taken up by the clear sky and the distant hills. Künl sketched several locations around Ljubljana in his sketchbook and also transferred a pastoral scene from the suburb of Šentpeter to a small canvas.
Künl painted Harvest in Mestni Log on Monday, 17 July 1854. Like the majority of artists of his and earlier generations, he worked outdoors, although the resulting pictures were always small oils or graphite studies, intended for the study of composition and colour. Franc Kavčič sketched his way around Italy, while Marko Pernhart sketched in the hills and mountains, precisely dating his sketches of clouds. Subsequent generations of artists transferred these sketch-like qualities, improvisations and impressions to gallery canvases, and showed once again that style is not just technique but also an intersection of self-confidence, message and social dynamics. This small image is thus an ideal starting point for a conversation about how bold European artists adopt the marginal practices of an earlier generation and place them at the centre of their activity. The National Gallery took the painting over from the National Museum in 1933.