Can You Spend 10 Minutes With This Painting?
Thanks for spending 1 minute and 30 seconds with the art! (Did you feel the cold?) If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.” Now, we’ll tell you a bit about it.
Let’s start by going back in time. Imagine it’s the 1560s and your friend Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a well-to-do banker, invites you to dinner at his country house outside what is now Antwerp, Belgium.
There, in a single room, you encounter six large paintings — each more than five feet across — adorning the walls. They are the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Together, these imaginary scenes depict villagers living and working through the changing seasons.
One of the six is the painting you just spent 1 minute and 30 seconds with, now called “Hunters in the Snow,” a depiction of a harsh winter:
The other five scenes continue on a march through the year. Our winter painting gives way to early spring (“The Gloomy Day”):
Then on to later spring (that panel is now, unfortunately, lost — most likely as the paintings were changing hands sometime between 1595 and 1659).
And early summer (“Haymaking”):
Late summer (“The Harvesters”):
And finally, fall (“The Return of the Herd”):
These scenes are from Bruegel’s imagination, possibly inspired by the landscape of coastal northwestern Europe and his travels in the Italian Alps.
You would have been a very lucky guest to have seen all six paintings in one place. They’ve since been split up and scattered across the world, through the hands of archdukes and emperors, from private estates to grand palaces, and now accessible to the public. “Haymaking” (early summer) is on display at the Lobkowicz Palace Museum in Prague; “The Harvesters” (late summer) is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the remaining three are at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Jonathan Fine, the director of the Kunsthistorisches museum, is our guide today to “Hunters in the Snow.” (The painting will be featured in a coming show at the museum in March.)
In 1565, the paintings would have been startling and avant-garde, Mr. Fine said. “Up until then, most of what you would have seen in wealthy people or aristocrats’ houses would be portraits or religious paintings. So moving into paintings that are purely of nature, and of human activities in nature, is a very, very new thing.”
The painting is distinct, too, in that it is a depiction of poor and working-class people going about their everyday lives. That was rare for work of this period, he said.
In the winter panel, we slide into Bruegel’s world from the left, joining these hunters and their dogs, heads hung low, as they trudge home through heavy snow:
This is a busy scene, with at least 84 people and at least 29 animals. But only one set of eyes is actually looking back at us — those of the dog in the bottom-left corner:
If you’re curious how the hunt went, its face tells you all you need to know.
This is the only piece of game the hunters seem to have brought home:
From here, the trees in the foreground pull our eyes down the hill, and into a world of bitter cold. The fields can’t be worked, and the mill wheel has frozen over:
Yet the scene is full of life, too. An idle mill might leave time for people to play …
… hold hands …
… and have a little fun.
Looking at our friends here, your initial impression might be that you’re witnessing a jubilant scene, something like a 16th-century version of a snow day. This is probably what makes it a popular Christmas card design today.
But you can’t zoom in on a Christmas card. If you could, you might sense something more desperate in the air.
First, of course, is the oppressive cold. Bruegel painted this scene during the Little Ice Age, defined by some climate researchers as from the early 14th century to the mid-19th century. Average temperatures in some parts of the world dropped more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit.
But there’s something else there; you may have noticed some unease in the picture as your minutes ticked by. People may be having fun, but as Mr. Fine put it, “It’s a picture of a season of precarity, of life being drawn tight, and like a thread it could snap.”
Look at this poor chap:
This poor sign:
This poor child:
In the distance, there appears to be a chimney fire while people rush with ladders to help. There’s a cruel irony in having to put out a fire in this intense cold:
Above it all is a lone black bird, taking flight:
“I think about what startled it,” Mr. Fine said. “Why is this one flying, and the other three are not?”
To him, it all speaks to a sense that there is a lurking danger. “Not the danger that’s sort of like a big, bad wolf in the foreground,” he said. “But sort of the fragility, I would say, of human life.”
Will they have enough food? Will they make it through winter? Are they having fun on the ice? Will that house burn down? What scared that bird?
Bruegel doesn’t answer these questions. But for him, all that joy and all that suffering — the dogs and the skaters, the birds and the hunters — belonged together on a single canvas.
via www.nytimes.com
February 4, 2025 at 04:58PM
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