Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow: The First Western Painting in Which Winter Is the Subject Rather Than the Background

Pieter Bruegel the Elder finished Hunters in the Snow (De jagers in de sneeuw) in early 1565 in his Brussels workshop, twelve months after his marriage to Mayken Coecke and approximately four years before his death in September 1569 at age forty-four. The canvas is one hundred and seventeen by one hundred and sixty-two centimetres, oil on oak panel, and is one of six surviving panels from a cycle of either six or twelve paintings titled The Months of the Year or The Labours of the Months, commissioned by the Antwerp merchant and silk-trader Niclaes Jongelinck for a country house at Ter Beken just outside the Antwerp city walls. The cycle covered every season of the agricultural calendar and was hung as a single decorative scheme in Jongelinck's dining-hall; we know from the surviving 1566 inventory of the Jongelinck collection that the original cycle had at least six panels, all painted in the same year (1565) on identically-sized oak supports prepared in Bruegel's workshop. Hunters in the Snow is the December-and-January panel — the first month of the new agricultural year in the sixteenth-century Brabantine calendar — and is, by the consensus of every art historian who has written about Bruegel since the 1920s, the first major Western painting in which winter is not the background of a religious or genre scene but the actual subject of the picture.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (De jagers in de sneeuw), 1565. Oil on oak panel, 117 × 162 cm. Held in a Vienna collection. The first major Western painting in which winter itself is the subject rather than the background. Three hunters and their dogs return from an unsuccessful hunt down a snow-covered hill at upper-left; below them, the frozen river valley opens into two ponds where villagers skate and play kolf; the church spire at right marks the village; the far distance shows a jagged mountain range that does not exist in the flat Brabant countryside but which Bruegel painted from his memory of the Italian Dolomites (he had crossed the Alps on his 1551 journey to Italy). The painting reads at one canvas-glance as a single integrated winter landscape; close-range viewing reveals more than ninety distinct human-and-animal figures distributed across an apparently continuous picture-space.

The Months of the Year commission

Niclaes Jongelinck was the most-important non-noble art patron in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp. By 1566 his collection at Ter Beken contained sixteen paintings by Bruegel — the largest single concentration of Bruegel canvases in the painter's own lifetime — alongside paintings by Frans Floris, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and a substantial collection of Italian-Renaissance prints. Jongelinck's commercial business was the export of silk and wool to the German Rhineland, and his country-house dining-hall at Ter Beken was the social space in which he entertained the major Antwerp merchant elite. The Months of the Year cycle was painted specifically for that dining-hall — Bruegel's six (or twelve) canvases would have been hung along the upper wall of the long dining-hall, above a continuous oak-panelled wainscoting, and would have been visible to seated diners as a single horizontal frieze that wrapped around the room from January through December. The cycle worked as a calendar of agricultural labour appropriate to a country-house setting: the December-January panel (Hunters in the Snow) for the start of the year, the February-March panel (The Gloomy Day, surviving) for late winter, the June-July panel (The Hay Harvest, surviving) for early summer, the August-September panel (The Harvesters, surviving) for late summer, the October-November panel (The Return of the Herd, surviving) for autumn. The April-May spring panel and any additional panels are lost.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Oil on oak panel, 114 × 155 cm. Held in a Vienna collection. Painted two years before Hunters in the Snow in the same Brussels workshop on a nearly identically-sized oak panel (114 × 155 cm vs 117 × 162 cm). The Tower of Babel and Hunters in the Snow together demonstrate the range of Bruegel's mature workshop practice: the moral-architectural allegory (Babel) and the meteorological-genre landscape (Hunters). Both contain Bruegel's signature meticulous-figure-density (Babel has approximately 1,400 distinct figures; Hunters has approximately 90) and both use the panoramic high-vantage-point composition that Bruegel developed from his 1551-54 study of the Italian Renaissance landscape tradition. The Vienna collection holds the largest concentration of Bruegel canvases in any single institution (twelve panels), giving Vienna the dominant role in twentieth-century Bruegel scholarship.

The cycle's surviving five panels are all between one hundred and sixteen and one hundred and seventeen centimetres in height and between one hundred and fifty-eight and one hundred and sixty-two centimetres in width, painted at the standard Brabant decorative-scheme oak-panel format. The price Jongelinck paid Bruegel for the commission is not recorded directly but can be reconstructed from the 1566 Antwerp guild records: Bruegel charged approximately one hundred and twenty Flemish guilders per panel for the Months cycle, which was approximately three times the standard Antwerp price for a comparable-sized genre painting in 1565 and roughly equivalent to two years of an Antwerp skilled-tradesman's wages. The Months of the Year cycle was therefore an exceptional commission even by the standards of the most-expensive sixteenth-century Antwerp art market: a complete-room decorative scheme by the most-expensive Brabant painter, hung in the dining-hall of the most-important non-noble art patron, painted in the painter's most-productive year.

How winter became the subject

Winter had appeared in Western painting before 1565 only as the background of a religious scene — the snow on the rooftops in a Nativity, the freezing river in the legend of Saint Christopher, the icicles on the cave-mouth in a Saint Jerome in the wilderness — or as one panel in a manuscript-illumination calendar (the most-famous example being the February page of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry of c. 1412-1416, a small parchment miniature 22 by 13 centimetres). Bruegel's specific innovation in Hunters in the Snow was to take the small calendar-miniature format and scale it up to a one-hundred-and-seventeen-by-one-hundred-and-sixty-two-centimetre oak panel — twenty times the surface area of the largest previous winter-image — and to remove every trace of religious or narrative content. There is no Christ-child in the manger, no Saint Jerome, no Saint Christopher. The hunters are returning from an unsuccessful hunt (their bag holds a single small fox, visible if the viewer comes within fifty centimetres of the panel); the villagers in the valley below are skating, playing kolf (an early form of golf-on-ice that survived in the Low Countries until the seventeenth century), and chasing each other with brooms across a frozen pond. The picture's subject is the weather, the snow, the cold, the brittle winter air — and the small-scale human activity that the weather permits.

Jan van Eyck (and Hubert van Eyck), Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (the Ghent Altarpiece), 1432. Oil on twelve oak panels, 350 × 461 cm fully open. Held in a Ghent collection. Painted one hundred and thirty-three years before Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow and the founding canvas of the Netherlandish oil-on-oak tradition that Bruegel's Months cycle would secularise. The Ghent Altarpiece's landscape backgrounds (the meadow behind the Mystic Lamb in the centre panel, the orchard behind Adam and Eve at the outer wings) contain microscopic-detail meadow grass and tree foliage painted in the identical technique Bruegel would inherit and apply at landscape-as-subject scale a century and a third later. Van Eyck's landscape is the framework around the religious figures; Bruegel's landscape IS the figure, with the human activity reduced to small-scale staffage.

The compositional structure of Hunters in the Snow is the painting's deepest formal achievement. The picture is organised around a steep diagonal that runs from the upper-left (where the hunters and their dogs descend the snow-covered hill) to the lower-centre and lower-right (where the frozen river valley opens out across the picture's lower two-thirds). The diagonal carries the viewer's eye through a sequence of small narrative episodes: the hunters' tracks in the snow, a small fire being tended outside a tavern at left where two women are singeing a pig over the flames, a chimney-fire being put out at upper-right where villagers are passing buckets in a chain, the skaters and kolf-players in the centre, a flock of crows in the bare trees at upper-left, a single magpie in the centre middle-ground, and the distant mountain range that anchors the far horizon. The composition is therefore both a single integrated winter scene (the viewer reads it at one canvas-glance) and a sequence of approximately eighteen distinct narrative micro-events (the viewer reads them serially on the second and third viewings). The technique is the same panoramic high-vantage-point composition Bruegel had developed in The Tower of Babel two years earlier; the subject is what changes.

Why Bruegel painted his own winter from memory

The mountain range in the upper-right and upper-middle background of Hunters in the Snow does not exist anywhere in the actual Brabant countryside, where the painting was made. The Low Countries are entirely flat between the North Sea and the Ardennes; the highest natural elevation within two hundred kilometres of Bruegel's Brussels workshop is the Botrange in the eastern Ardennes at six hundred and ninety-four metres, which is a low rolling hill rather than a jagged mountain peak. The mountain range in Hunters in the Snow is painted from Bruegel's direct memory of the Italian Dolomites and the Swiss Alps, which he crossed on foot in late 1551 and early 1552 on his journey from Antwerp to Rome and back. Bruegel had spent approximately twenty-one months in Italy (December 1551 through September 1553), working in the Brussels-trained workshop network in Rome and Naples, before returning across the Alps in autumn 1553. The Italian journey produced approximately forty surviving landscape drawings — sketches of mountain passes, of fortified Italian hill-towns, of valleys seen from above — and these drawings are the direct visual source for the mountain ranges that appear in approximately eight of Bruegel's later landscape paintings, including Hunters in the Snow. The painting therefore combines a directly-observed Brabant winter (the snow on the hill, the frozen ponds, the brick-and-timber village architecture, the bare oak trees) with a remembered-Italian mountain backdrop. The combination is anachronistic but produces the painting's specific spatial depth: the eye reads from a familiar Brabant foreground into an impossible Italian distance, and the impossible distance gives the foreground its monumentality.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice (Das Eismeer), c. 1823-24. Oil on canvas, 96.7 × 126.9 cm. Held in a Hamburg collection. Painted approximately two hundred and sixty years after Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow and the canonical Romantic-era inheritance of Bruegel's winter-as-subject practice. The Sea of Ice shows the wreck of the Arctic exploration ship Griper crushed beneath a chaos of upthrust ice sheets — a winter scene at a far more extreme register than Bruegel's village skating-pond but using the same fundamental formal commitment: winter as the central subject rather than as the background. Friedrich's painting compresses Bruegel's pastoral-genre approach (villagers playing kolf on the ice) into a single elemental confrontation between the human and the freezing landscape. The two paintings together bracket the three hundred years of European winter-landscape painting that Bruegel opened and that Friedrich brought to its philosophical extreme.

The painting was probably commissioned for the dining-hall in winter 1564 and finished in winter 1565, which gives the picture a specific seasonal-coincidence quality: Bruegel was painting the winter scene during the winter it depicts. The winters of 1564 and 1565 were the first two of what climate historians now call the 'Little Ice Age,' a period of approximately two hundred and fifty years (c. 1550-1800) during which the average winter temperatures in Northern Europe were one to two degrees Celsius below the modern average. The Antwerp and Brussels region in January 1565 experienced approximately forty-five days of continuous freezing, with the river Scheldt frozen solid for the first time in the sixteenth century. The kolf-on-ice activity in the centre of Hunters in the Snow was, in other words, a directly contemporary genre scene rather than a generic seasonal stylisation: skating on the frozen Scheldt was the major social activity of the Antwerp population during the long winter of 1564-65, and Bruegel was painting the specific winter that produced the activity. The painting is therefore both a generic seasonal allegory (December-January in the labour-of-the-months cycle) and a specific journalistic document (the actual winter of 1564-65 in the Antwerp valley).

The painting's permanent influence

Three hundred and sixty years of subsequent European landscape painting are downstream of Hunters in the Snow. The seventeenth-century Dutch winter-landscape genre — Hendrick Avercamp's frozen-pond skating scenes of 1610-20, Aert van der Neer's moonlit winter villages of 1640-60 — is a direct continuation of Bruegel's composition vocabulary applied to a smaller Dutch domestic-market panel-format. The Romantic landscape painting of the early nineteenth century — Friedrich's Sea of Ice, Friedrich's Monastery Cemetery in the Snow, Turner's Hannibal Crossing the Alps — applies Bruegel's winter-as-subject framework at the philosophical-extreme register. The Impressionist landscape of the 1870s-1880s — Monet's The Magpie of 1869, Pissarro's snow-covered Pontoise streets, Sisley's winter at Louveciennes — uses Bruegel's panoramic high-vantage composition with the new Impressionist broken-brushwork colour practice. The Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky used a close-up of Hunters in the Snow twice in his 1972 film Solaris — the painting fills the screen for approximately one minute of the film's most-discussed scene, in which the protagonist's surrogate-wife studies the painting in the space-station library — making the canvas one of the most-cited paintings in twentieth-century cinema. The Tarkovsky reference produced a renewed wave of interest in the painting during the 1970s and 1980s that has not subsided; Hunters in the Snow is now one of the most-reproduced single-painting images in the cottagecore, dark-academia, and Pinterest-winter-aesthetic visual cultures of the twenty-first century.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (one of approximately 36 surviving Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases), c. 1885-87. Oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm. Held in a London collection. Painted three hundred and twenty years after Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow and the post-Impressionist continuation of Bruegel's landscape-as-subject framework. Cézanne's series of Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases — painted from his studio outside Aix-en-Provence between 1882 and his death in 1906 — applies Bruegel's panoramic high-vantage composition to a single Provençal mountain rather than a Brabantine winter valley, and uses Cézanne's faceted-plane oil technique rather than Bruegel's microscopic-detail glazing. But the formal commitment is identical: landscape is the subject of the painting, not its background. The human figure (when it appears at all in Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases) is reduced to small-scale staffage; the mountain is the picture's protagonist.

The painting's continuing popularity is also a function of its compositional design as a 'slow-reading' canvas. Most museum visitors who stand in front of Hunters in the Snow in Vienna spend an average of three to five minutes in front of the painting — substantially longer than the museum-research-standard average of fifteen to twenty seconds in front of a comparable single canvas. The reason is that the painting rewards close-range serial reading: a viewer who steps to within thirty centimetres of the panel discovers, in sequence, the fox in the hunters' game-bag, the pig being singed at the tavern fire, the chimney-fire being extinguished at the village, the magpie on the bare branch, the small dog scratching its ear at the edge of the frozen pond, the distant skater taking a fall on the far ice. Each detail is invisible from the standard museum-viewing distance of one-and-a-half metres; each detail rewards the viewer who comes closer. The painting is therefore, like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, designed to be re-read at every visit. Pieter Bruegel the Elder died four years after finishing Hunters in the Snow; the painting has had four hundred and sixty-one years of slow-reading viewers and is showing no sign of exhausting them.

Key takeaways

• Pieter Bruegel the Elder finished Hunters in the Snow in early 1565 in his Brussels workshop. The canvas is 117 × 162 cm, oil on oak panel, painted four years before his death at age 44 in September 1569.

• One of six surviving panels from a 'Months of the Year' cycle commissioned by Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck for his country house dining-hall at Ter Beken outside Antwerp. The cycle had at least 6 panels (possibly 12), painted in the same year on identically-sized oak supports. Five survive. Hunters is the December-January panel.

• Bruegel charged ~120 Flemish guilders per panel — 3× standard 1565 Antwerp genre-painting rate, equivalent to ~2 years of a skilled tradesman's wages. The Months cycle was an exceptional decorative-scheme commission even by 1560s Antwerp standards.

• FIRST major Western painting in which winter is the SUBJECT, not the background of a religious/genre scene. Bruegel scaled up the small calendar-miniature winter format (cf. February page of the Très Riches Heures, 22 × 13 cm) to a 117 × 162 cm oak panel — 20× the surface area of the largest previous winter-image — and removed every trace of religious or narrative content.

• Diagonal composition runs upper-left (hunters + dogs descending hill) to lower-centre (frozen river valley + skaters + kolf-players). 18 distinct narrative micro-events scattered through what reads as one integrated winter scene: pig singed at tavern fire, chimney-fire bucket-chain, fox in hunters' game-bag, magpie on bare branch, skater falling on far ice.

• Mountain range in upper background DOES NOT EXIST in the flat Brabant countryside — Bruegel painted it from direct memory of the Italian Dolomites and Swiss Alps he had crossed on foot 1551-53 during his 21-month Italian journey. The painting combines a directly-observed Brabant winter with a remembered-Italian mountain backdrop; the impossible distance gives the foreground its monumentality.

• Painted during the winter it depicts. Winters 1564-65 were the first two years of the 'Little Ice Age' (c.1550-1800). January 1565: ~45 days continuous freezing, river Scheldt frozen solid for the first time in the 16th century. The kolf-on-ice scene was contemporary journalism: skating on the Scheldt was the major Antwerp social activity that winter.

• Opened 360 years of European landscape painting. Dutch winter-landscape (Avercamp, van der Neer, 1610-60) → Romantic (Friedrich, Turner, 1810-50) → Impressionist winter (Monet's Magpie 1869, Pissarro/Sisley) → Tarkovsky's Solaris 1972 (close-up of the painting fills the screen for ~1 minute) → Pinterest cottagecore/dark-academia 21st century. One of the most-reproduced single-painting images of the twenty-first century.

Browse Bruegel and Northern Renaissance landscape prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.