The Deadly Truth behind Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Idyllic Winter Landscapes
In Hunters in the Snow (1565), one of the most famous images in Western culture, three men and their dogs—soggy, exhausted, and hunched against the cold—trudge home from a hunting expedition. They reach the edge of a hill, catching a glimpse of the winter wonderland stretched before them in the valley below. Bruegel similarly introduces the viewer to the expansive landscape through the hunters’ point of view; the eye enters the painting on the left, following their footprints across the snowy bank.
But for the artist and the ordinary folk populating his winter works, these images would have been bittersweet, if not foreboding: At the time these paintings were made, they were living through a period of intense climate change now known as the “Little Ice Age.”
