Snow, oxen and a stone calvary, painted by a man living under palm trees. In Christmas Night, Gauguin looked back from the far side of the world to a Breton winter he had known years earlier.

The Three Kings are here, the Holy Family is here, and almost nobody in the picture notices. Bruegel set the Epiphany in a Flemish village in a heavy snowfall, and the miracle is the easiest thing in it to miss.

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.

Caspar David Friedrich painted a single subject for forty years — the human figure, usually small, usually seen from behind, standing in a landscape too large to contain. The figure is alone. The landscape is the argument. Eight paintings from the German Romantic painter whose pictures have become shorthand for solitude itself.