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The Hunters in the Snow

Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Renaissance & Mannerism

Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569)
Date: 1565
Dimensions: 117 x 162 cm
Medium: Oil on panel
Location: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

The Hunters in the Snow shows three weary hunters and their dogs trudging home through deep snow, with only a single fox to show for their efforts. Below them opens a vast winter valley full of life. It is one of a series of six paintings on the seasons of the year.

A closer look

The composition leads the eye diagonally from the dark silhouettes of the hunters and bare trees down to the frozen ponds, where tiny villagers skate, play curling and spin tops. To the left, people at an inn are singeing a pig over a fire whose flames are blown by the wind, and the inn's sign hangs crookedly. Beyond, jagged alpine peaks rise under a cold, greenish sky. With a limited palette of white, grey-green and brown, Bruegel captures the silence and bite of a winter day, during the bitter winters of the so-called Little Ice Age.

History of the painting

The painting is one of a series of the seasons, or months of the year, that Bruegel painted in 1565 for Nicolaes Jonghelinck’s house in Antwerp. In 1594 the city of Antwerp gave the series to Archduke Ernest of Austria, the new governor of the Netherlands, and it passed into the Habsburg collections. Five of the panels survive, three of them, including this one, in Vienna.

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