Hunters in the Snow: Pieter Bruegel: Great art Explained

Hello, my name is James Payne. I've spent years telling you about the stories behind great art and now my book Great Art Explained takes that further and deeper. It is a book that is a gift for the curious, an invitation to see art with fresh eyes. Available worldwide. Thank you. Peter Bruegel the Elder brought art to the people and he brought the people into art. He made his money from printmaking, from reproducing his own paintings, so that they could reach a much wider audience. In a sense he was one of the first artists to understand mass communication through images. He would probably be delighted to know that Hunters in the Snow has become one of the biggest selling Christmas cards in history. But of course it's far more than a festive card. It is an image that not only reflects a radical change in what artists put on the canvas, ordinary people and the world they inhabit, but also reflects a mini ice age. A winter that was so extreme that thousands died of cold and hunger. Birds fell dead from the sky and people thought it was the end of the world. To modern eyes Hunters in the Snow might evoke a picture-perfect winter's day, full of charm and that is both familiar and influential. But for Bruegel and his contemporaries, winter was not picturesque. It was harsh, dangerous and often deadly. In that sense the painting's beauty is inseparable from its melancholy. It is not a celebration of winter, but a recognition of it. An honest, empathetic portrayal of human beings enduring and coexisting with the overwhelming forces of nature. It is that bittersweet tension that makes Hunters in the Snow such a powerful image. We don't know exactly when or where Pieter Bruegel was born, but it was probably around 1525, in or near the town of Breda in the Netherlands. As a young man he moved to the prosperous city of Antwerp. At the time it was the economic centre of the western world, a global hub of trade and finance. This newfound wealth attracted merchants and artists from across Europe. Hunters in the Snow would be painted in 1565 at the onset of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling defined by long bleak winters, short summers and failed harvests. In January of that year the cold was so harsh that an iceberg crashed into the port of Rotterdam. But while people endured extreme weather, they were also living through deep political and religious upheaval. The Low Countries, what we now know as Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, were then part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire, ruled first by Charles V and later Philip II of Spain. But across the region Protestant reformers were challenging Catholic authority. Calvinism, with its rejection of religious imagery and lavish ritual, was spreading fast. Bruegel lived at a time when the printing press had done to Europe what the internet has done to us. It transformed access to information, destroyed old hierarchies and created a completely new kind of audience. And he was one of the first generation of artists to come of age at a time when sacred imagery was losing its dominance as the central focus of art. Then in 1566, just a year after Bruegel painted Hunters in the Snow, tensions broke fully. Mobs of Calvinists raged through towns and cities destroying statues, paintings and church decorations, in a wave of iconoclasm which became known as the Bildungssturm or breaking of the statues. For them such images were idolatrous. This destruction not only fueled the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, but it also reshaped the course of art itself. Churches stopped commissioning religious works, so artists began creating more everyday and secular scenes for the growing middle class audience. It was a period defined by extremes. Brutal winters, poor harvests and hunger in the alongside immense wealth built on global trade and a rising middle class. So while the beauty of Hunters in the Snow continues to speak to us today, it is equally a document of its time, revealing the physical and economic hardships of rural life in Bruegel's Flanders. Unlike the leading artists of Italy or Spain, Bruegel never worked as a court painter. He didn't create portraits of kings, queens or nobles, like Titian in the court of Charles V, or Sofonisba Anguissola for Philip II. His focus was on genre paintings, populated by peasants and the landscape and world they inhabited. Bruegel did paint religious works for private commissions, but he became known for his landscapes and peasant scenes, and he would go on to paint workers his whole life. In this respect he was a pioneer, as this was a rare form of art in his day. We have to remember that Bruegel himself at the time was considered a mere artisan, on a level with a carpenter or weaver. He started his career as a draftsman for a printer in Antwerp, then one of the richest cities in Europe and the centre of printing. Prints are relatively cheap, and both ideological and artistic ideas could be disseminated widely and easily. Printmaking taught Bruegel how to communicate ideas, how to reach a mass audience and how to tell complex stories compactly. He was however also schooled in the traditions of fine art, and like many educated young artists of his time, he travelled to Italy to study. But it wasn't the classical sculptures, the architecture or lavish religious paintings that impressed him. It was the Alps that he had seen on his journey. A print of the Alps created from a painting he made on his travels became a bestseller in the notoriously flat Low Countries. The Northern Renaissance in the Low Countries was obviously influenced by what was happening in Italy, but although earlier artists like Albrecht Durer looked to Italian Renaissance ideas, Bruegel was interested in ideas closer to home, Netherlandish people and their customs. What made Bruegel truly groundbreaking was not what he painted, but how he painted it. The tradition of painting peasants had evolved slowly from the margins of manuscripts to the walls of great houses, and Bruegel is the moment where it stops being background and becomes the story. Peasants in this period were often portrayed as buffoons or figures of ridicule, but Bruegel didn't share this crude approach. He paints them with a quiet dignity, as real human beings rather than caricatures. His peasant wedding and peasant dance may contain humour, but it is humour laced with warmth and understanding. He gives these men and women weight, individuality and presence, turning their daily rituals into something monumental. Bruegel's art is the product of many influences, spanning Netherlandish manuscript illumination, Boschian allegory, Italian compositional theory and the humanist culture of mid-16th century Antwerp. An important figure who is rarely discussed when it comes to Bruegel is Simon Benning from Ghent, who portrayed peasants with dignity. Benning's calendars and books of hours also pioneered techniques that Bruegel perfected, such as high viewpoints, sweeping panoramas and seasonal cycles. An important source of inspiration was the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who although active nearly a century earlier, was still hugely popular when Bruegel began his career. Publishers even commissioned Bruegel to design works in the manner of Bosch. Apart from the most obvious similarity of the crowded and busy canvases, Bruegel's early works such as the Fall of the Rebel Angels and the Triumph of Death clearly echo Bosch's moral allegories. We could say that Bruegel inherited Bosch's moral imagination, but stripped it of demons and miracles, translating it into real life. It's possible that we are still fascinated today by Bruegel, because really he painted us. Not kings or saints, but ordinary people trudging through snow, working, eating, celebrating or just enduring. He turned everyday life into something monumental, finding poetry in the routines and struggles that most artists ignored. Hunters in the Snow was part of a series of six paintings representing the seasons. The commission came from a wealthy merchant in Antwerp, Nicholas Jongerlink. Unlike Bruegel's prints, which were widely distributed, this series of expensive oil paintings wouldn't have been seen by ordinary people, only those in Jongerlink's circle. Each painting was quite large and they hung together in his dining room. The paintings would have surrounded visitors while they were dining in the Jongerlink residence, and the richness of detail and flow of storytelling through the seasons would have made it an immersive experience. Back then people didn't think in terms of four equal seasons, but rather six unequal ones, and the cycle included gloomy day representing early spring, spring now sadly missing, haymaking showing early summer, harvesters depicting late summer, the return of the herd for autumn and hunters in the snow, our familiar winter scene. All six paintings share a compositional device known as the balcony motif. We view each scene from a hill in the foreground, like a balcony, watching the landscape unfurl beneath us. Bruegel is observing humanity from above, a bird's eye view, detached but fascinated. While all six panels were revolutionary, the winter scene has become iconic, maybe because it's Bruegel's philosophy in a single image. Bruegel was fascinated with winter scenes, and at the time of the mini ice age he naturally produced many of them, but none of them captured the raw power of winter as vividly as Hunters in the Snow, a painting that chills you to the bone. As we enter the scene we see three men trudging through ankle-deep snow, returning home from the hunt. It hasn't gone well, their heads hang low, their dogs are thin and weary, and the day's catch amounts to just one scrawny fox slung over a Tiny tracks in the snow hint at a creature that escaped them, a reminder that hunger is never really far away. The vertical lines of the bare trees lead us on a descending slope into the far distance. As is usual with Bruegel, his paintings have a multitude of details occurring at the same time on different planes. Here a man way in the distance is himself hunting, and we see a burst of gunshot. Over here we see that a chimney fire is raging, and men climb the roof, perhaps to contain it, as another rushes to bring a ladder. Here people gather around a fire outside an inn. They're preparing to roast a pig in a ritual known as the singeing of the swine, though the animal itself is nowhere to be seen. The inn sign shows St Hubert, the patron saint of Hunters. It shows the scene of Hubert's conversion to Christianity. He was hunting on Good Friday when he saw a crucifix appear between the antlers of a deer. The sign hangs precariously over the head of the villagers, and the heavy snow and wind could bring this crashing down at any moment, emphasising the inherent danger of winter months, or perhaps the precarious nature of the hunt. The text on the sign translates as to the deer, another hunting reference. Further down the slope an empty bird trap reinforces the message, food is limited. Crows and magpies add a quiet sense of foreboding. In Flemish folklore these were birds associated with death or bad weather, reminding us that beauty and menace share the same sky. It is a scene of high contrasts, both visually and metaphorically. The colour palette is cool and pale, the snow dominating the scene, while the trees, figures and animals stand out in sober dark shades, almost silhouettes. This is the beginning of the so-called Little Ice Age, and people are unaware of the even more extreme temperatures to come, represented by the hunters entering the frame after their dismal performance. The harsh reality of the unsuccessful hunt is balanced by the broader themes of human resilience. In the bottom right we see one woman pulling another on a sled. Beyond the bridge we can see people playing games, such as colf, a medieval ancestor of ice hockey, and what seems to be an early form of curling. Someone has fallen over and their hat has come off. Children and adults play together, even a dog joins the fun. Yet even among the jollity on the ice, the signs of hardship remain. The mill wheel is frozen solid, no grain can be ground. And look at what rises out of the Netherlandish landscape in the distance. Incongruous mountains, vast and snow-covered. These mountains are not real, they are Bruegel's memories of the alpine landscape from his earlier travels. Completely unlike anything you'd find in the Low Countries. The alpine motif, which had been his best-selling print, makes a dramatic cameo to give the painting a sense of fantasy and storytelling. To exaggerate the sense of harshness and extreme weather the hunters had endured. From our high vantage point we can see both the joy and the struggle of life. Bruegel reminds us that happiness and hardship exist alongside each other. Pieter Bruegel died young, in his 40s, leaving behind only around 45 paintings, 60 drawings and 80 prints. His focus on everyday life and his relatable subject matter would shape art in the Netherlands for generations. From him we can draw a line directly to the Dutch Golden Age a century later. Yet strangely he was forgotten about by the general public for centuries and considered old-fashioned. He had to wait until the 20th century to be rediscovered as one of the greatest visual storytellers. Bruegel painted in a world where power and faith were shifting, where global trade brought new wealth and where art began to serve a broader public beyond the church. He put the focus on ordinary people, the importance of community and the ongoing connection to the land. He made sure the ordinary and the everyday were worthy of artistic attention. In a world increasingly fractured and individualistic, Bruegel reminds us of our shared condition, our shared responsibility. His paintings are vast human tapestries, showing that history isn't made by heroes alone but by countless unnamed people whose lives, like ours, unfold in the shadow of something bigger.