Three weary hunters trudge home through the snow with their dogs, carrying only a single fox. Below, villagers skate and play on the ice, and jagged snowy peaks rise in the distance. It is one of the earliest and most moving winter landscapes in Western art.
Key facts
- Artist
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder1525–1569 · Netherlandish
- Date
- 1565
- Period
- Northern Renaissance1430–1580
- Medium
- Oil on oak panel
- Dimensions
- 117 × 162 cm
- Location
- Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria
Actual size
Compared with an adult 170 cm tall
Palette
#656C56#4A4631#94907B#1C160D#C2BCA4Background
In 1565 the wealthy Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck commissioned Bruegel to paint a series showing the seasons or months of the year for his house. There were originally six panels; five survive, three of them in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The series continues the tradition of the “labours of the months” in medieval books of hours, using peasants' work and life across the seasons to express the cycle of time. The Hunters in the Snow shows deep winter, December to January.
The winter of 1564–65 fell in the “Little Ice Age”, and Europe endured exceptionally harsh cold. Some scholars see the painting as reflecting the artist's own experience of that bitter season.
Technique & composition
The composition unfolds along a diagonal from upper left to lower right: and trees line the slope, leading the eye down to the frozen ponds and the distant peaks. The dark figures and trunks in the foreground stand out as silhouettes against the snow.
Bruegel evokes winter cold with a restricted palette: grey-green sky and ice, white snow, dark brown figures and trees. This unified cool tonality makes you almost feel the biting air.
The do not exist in flat Flanders; they come from Bruegel's memories of crossing the Alps as a young man. He combined observation and imagination to create a “world landscape” at once specific and universal.
Details
Symbolism
A poor hunt
The hunters stoop, the dogs droop their tails, and the only catch is a scrawny fox. This is no heroic hunt but a picture of ordinary people struggling to survive a hard winter.
The crooked sign
The inn's on the left hangs askew, showing a stag and a saint, usually identified as Hubert or Eustace, patron saints of hunters. Its precarious angle may suggest the hunt was not blessed.
Joy on the ice
In contrast to the weary hunters, skate, play a form of hockey and spin tops. Bruegel shows both faces of winter: hardship and fun side by side, and life goes on.
Stories
- Did you know?
The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky quoted the painting in his films Solaris and Mirror; in Solaris a character on the space station gazes at it, homesick for Earth.
- Did you know?
In front of the inn, villagers are to singe a pig's bristles, preparing meat for the winter, an everyday seasonal task.
- Did you know?
At the lower right a is frozen solid and cannot turn, underscoring the severity of the winter.
Legacy
The Hunters in the Snow is a milestone of Western landscape painting: landscape is no longer just a backdrop for religious stories but the main subject, expressing season, climate and the human condition.
It is one of the most popular images for Christmas cards and inspired poems by William Carlos Williams and John Berryman; it remains the classic image of winter.
