Author
Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Movement / period
Renaissance
Medium
painting
Location
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
It belongs to Brueghel's cycle on the months of the year, painted for an Antwerp patron; five panels of the series survive, now divided between Vienna, Prague and New York.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- One of the earliest snow landscapes in European painting, made in the grip of the Little Ice Age, after the bitter winter of 1564-65 froze rivers across the Low Countries.
- It belongs to Brueghel's cycle on the months of the year, painted for an Antwerp patron; five panels of the series survive, now divided between Vienna, Prague and New York.
- The hunters come home with almost nothing — a single scrawny fox slung from a pole — so the day's hunt has plainly gone badly.
- The composition is so cinematic that directors have quoted it outright: it hangs in the space station in Tarkovsky's Solaris and appears in the prologue of Lars von Trier's Melancholia.
- The eye slides from the hunters' tired backs down to skaters no bigger than commas on the frozen ponds, then out to jagged peaks Brueghel had seen while crossing the Alps.
More details How a poor hunt opens onto an immense winter world, why Bruegel painted part of a calendar for a wealthy dining room, and how black birds make the snow feel colder.
A failed hunt
One fox says more than heroic prey
Three hunters and exhausted dogs return with a single fox. Nearby a sudden flame singes a pig.
Poor reward and necessary village work share the foreground without melodrama.
The hill is a stage ramp
One diagonal opens an entire country
Trees and slope lead down to skaters, games, bridges and distant labour.
Alpine peaks remembered from Bruegel's travels enlarge a Flemish village into a whole winter world.
Part of a calendar
Six panels surrounded a merchant with the seasons
Niclaes Jongelinck commissioned a six-part cycle in 1565, probably two months per panel. Five survive in Vienna, New York and Prague.
Together they turned a dining room into a journey through weather, labour and food.
Cold through colour
Snow is rarely pure white
Green-grey shadows meet dark hunters, trunks and birds. Crows and a flying magpie sharpen distance against pale fields.
Roofs become dark triangles and ponds light planes.
Landscape as protagonist
People matter because nature exceeds them
The eye soon leaves the hunters and travels across communal life. Season, not an individual hero, governs every action.
Landscape ceases to be background while remaining inhabited by work and play.
Official sources
Where to check
- Official institution site Kunsthistorisches Museum
- Hunters in the Snow: museum descriptionKunsthistorisches Museum
- Bruegel's cycle of seasonsThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
Visual context
