It is assumed that the two paintings were intended by Stubbs to be seen together.

They are beautifully constructed paintings. The frieze-like arrangement of the Reapers is harmonious - and the motion across the picture from left to right leads up to the overseer, whose triangle anchors the picture on the right-hand side. The shape of the workers is echoed in the tree line in pyramidal forms - as a formal bit of composition it is precise and compelling.

Representing people in spotless clothes is characteristic of Stubbs' paintings. It could be seen as pandering to the ruling class who wished to see their workers as clean and tidy. Alternatively, it could be seen as Stubbs deep understated egalitarianism - respect for the people he painted, and their contribution to society.

The Haymakers is dominated by choreography of the workers’ action. The workers appear frozen in time and action. The men are more realistically painted than the women. It is difficult to believe that the two women raking hay on the left can have needed to eke out a living working in the fields. Their dresses, looks and overall demeanour suggests perhaps a more leisured existence.

In the Haymakers the two women on the left are distinct individuals, their differences as sharply painted as their similarities. The third woman stands looking back at you. Hand on hip, she is challenging her 18th century audience to brush away their prejudices and acknowledge that she is different and has an attitude. The action pivots round her; she stands at the centre like a classical goddess. She looks out, inviting the viewer to witness activities that, through ritualistic repetition, have become as intrinsic to nature as are the seasons.

Shiny-coated shire horses stand blinkered in the midday sun, which melts the vista of English fields into a dreamy haze that contrasts with the clarity of the strangely elegant farm labourers in the foreground. Men and women rake and hoist hay onto a horse-drawn cart. In Reapers men and women gather and bind sheaves of wheat, while a supervisor on horseback looks on.

Stubbs admires rural workers just as he admires horses – and in both cases he seems to prefer the patient servant to the cold-eyed master. He does not prettify the labourers in Reapers and Haymakers to deny the realities of rural poverty: he does it to make them look heroic. Although fully dressed, they pose like classical nudes. This is more likely to be an attempt to dignify them than insult them.

There are also a number of unexplained elements to the painting that suggest a tension within the works.The clothes people wore in the 18th century were influenced by income and by fashion. Being poor did not mean living in rags. Even the very poorest had their best clothes for special occasions. Clothes helped define a person in the local community. The aim was self-respect within the proper station: women aspired to a five-shilling hat covered in black silk, men to silver-plated shoe-buckles at half-a-crown, or perhaps a watch, which they were unlikely to acquire unless their ticket came up in a watch-club raffle.

Stubbs' decision to dress his rural workers in posh clothes may be more subversive than has been recognised by art historians. Not everyone approved of well-dressed plebeians. In the eyes of the eighteenth-century élite (and probably most of Stubbs' clients), no group of working people was more guilty of sartorial extravagance than domestic servants. Snobbish complaints against servants were endlessly rehearsed in pamphlets, magazines, novels, plays and caricatures.

So precise is Stubbs in his fantasy images that the men’s breeches are impractically buttoned up, although in practice they would have had to undo some buttons to bend their knees.

The look the man on the horse in Reapers exchanges with the woman below him is full of significance. He is using his position of power to dominate the woman. The two workers on the left look up and give him a stare that suggests their disgust at his leering. His position on the horse and his stare add a tension that was rarely found in the paintings of the rural idyll. We do not know why Stubbs included this episode. In his field trips he possibly saw this happen and was concerned about the way the woman was being treated. It was also common knowledge that men in positions of power regularly sexually abused their women workers. It is reasonable to speculate that by creating this scene he is leaving the viewer to make up their minds about a society that was far from being without tensions of one sort or another.

In the 18th century the pictures would have been understood as an idealised vision romanticising a past that never existed. The pictures present this timeless, stately, clean, relaxing vision of pastoral life - good, honest labour being carried out by good honest people working in a benevolent society. And the skies are blue and the sun is shining. It's the kind of scene you might put on a tourist promotion calendar.

You have to put that against the reality of life in the late eighteenth century. The industrial revolution is beginning to crank up and social and economic upheaval is going on all around.

George Stubbs lived at a time when there was a clear hierarchy in terms of art genre.  According to traditional art history, before the mid-18th century the British simply couldn't paint. The best artists at work in England were all foreign, from Holbein and Van Dyck to Orazio Gentileschi and Peter Lely. In this account, the first original native painter was Hogarth, and the first genre to be distinctively British was landscape painting. Even in this we were no better than we ought to be: landscape was a lowly genre, some way below the salt, while history painting with its moral and didactic qualities lorded it at the head of the table. As Sir Joshua Reynolds, the man who sought above all others to put British painting on a par with the rest of Europe, said: "A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great."

George Stubbs was never a landscape painter as such but he often included a landscape as a backdrop to his paintings of horses and their owners, but this was secondary to the people and animals. His forte was equestrian art, which was included within the genre of 'sporting art'.  Like landscape paintings this was looked down upon by the critics and connoisseurs, probably due to its racing patronage. As it was the hunting, shooting and racing gentry who were Stubbs' greatest patrons, he tended to be overlooked as a serious artist.

Stubbs lived in an ordered patrician society pre the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The belief system can be summarised as follows: it was expected that everyone respected and adhered to the values of this society. Wealth was provided by God and this created peace, ease and sports. The landowner was there to ensure the smooth running of his estate.  The poor are beneficiaries of the rich serving to compliment their moral worth and superiority.  The landlord set the rules and the poor followed them. Everyone in the countryside lived in a rural idyll.  The rural labourer was happy, well fed and content with his and her lots. Everyone in this fantasy had both a stake and a shared faith in the stability of the prevailing social order.

Yet this was a total myth. There is plenty of evidence of unrest, social crime, gruelling poverty and unrest. The task of the creative artist was denying its existence.  He had to convey a happy rural life.

Within his paintings we get a glimpse of how Stubbs saw the world.  In  Mares and Foals in a River Landscape (on display in the Tate)  Stubbs incorporates horses into the landscape by using a subtle counter-change of tones to integrate them with the background: he contrasts the light profile of the white horse against a dark cloud in order to counterbalance the dark profiles of chestnut mares against the light sky. This tonal exchange is mirrored in the layout of the landscape where the bright billowing clouds are echoed by the dark forms of the tree. Even foals seem to draw milk from their mothers in much the same way that the land draws sustenance from the river. This is an idyllic vision of a Utopian world uncorrupted by the presence of man.

Artists produced work within this set of values, yet from time to time hinted at another world beyond their patrons’ fantasies. Stubbs had a great deal of sympathy for the stable boy, servant, and rural workers.  This is reflected in the fact that he always painted them with as much care as he painted the aristocracy that commissioned his works.  He made sure that they were clean, well dressed and presented in statuesque poses, never sweating or exhausted. His depiction of labour is of a symbolic and non-utilitarian kind.