The Hunters in the Snow
Weary hunters return home with a single fox. Below them villagers are skating. The painting was part of a series on the months of the year and is one of the first great winter landscapes.
The trees and the hunters lead the eye diagonally down into the valley and out towards the mountains.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the picture in Brussels in 1565. It was part of a series on the months of the year, commissioned by Niclaes Jonghelinck, a wealthy merchant in Antwerp, for his house. The series probably consisted of six pictures, five of which survive. The others are The Gloomy Day, The Hay Harvest, The Harvesters and The Return of the Herd.
Three hunters trudge through the snow, followed by a pack of dogs. Their catch is meagre: a single fox hangs on one hunter’s back. On the left is an inn with a sign hanging askew. In front of the inn some people are making a fire to singe the bristles off a pig. Down in the valley lie frozen ponds where villagers skate, play games and pull one another on sledges. The dogs look as tired as their masters.
The composition is built on a strong diagonal. The hunters and the dark tree trunks lead the eye from the left foreground down into the valley. From there the eye continues towards villages, a mill with a frozen waterwheel and jagged mountains in the distance. Such mountains do not exist in Flanders. They were probably inspired by the Alps, which Bruegel crossed on a journey to Italy in the early 1550s.
The colours are few and muted. White, black and brown dominate, against a greenish sky and ice. The light is cold and the silhouettes are sharp. The birds perched in the trees or flying over the valley heighten the sense of silence. Bruegel painted in oil on oak panel, often in thin layers through which the underdrawing is partly visible. The details in the valley are small but clear, and the viewer can go on discovering new figures for a long time.
The picture can be read as a portrayal of winter as a time of work, hardship and play. The contrast between the weary hunters and the people playing on the ice shows different sides of life. The winter of 1564–1565 was very cold in northern Europe, and it has often been suggested that it influenced the picture. The period is sometimes called the Little Ice Age, but the link to the painting is an interpretation.
The series came to the city of Antwerp and was given in 1594 to Archduke Ernest of Austria. From there the pictures entered the Habsburg collections. Three of them, including The Hunters in the Snow, are today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. There they hang together with several other of Bruegel’s most important works, in one of the largest collections of his paintings in the world.
The Hunters in the Snow is one of the most famous winter paintings in the world. It has become a model for how landscape painting can portray both nature and people. The director Andrei Tarkovsky used it in his films Solaris and Mirror. The picture often appears on Christmas cards and has inspired poets such as William Carlos Williams.