Capturing the Beauty and Terror of Winter

How the winter months inspired artists across regions and time periods, from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Utagawa Hiroshige.

The following essay was first published on January 9th, 2024. For readers in the Northern Hemisphere, winter is just around the corner, so I’ve decided to resurrect this piece from the archives.

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To my readers in the States, I hope you have a peaceful Thanksgiving weekend surrounded by loved ones. To everyone else, stay warm! -Nicole

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Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder ca. 1565. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) hangs against a dark wall in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The moody backdrop makes the starkness of the wintry scene ever-more prominent, luring visitors into Bruegel’s imaginative take on a winter’s day.

I say “imaginative” because the landscape depicted in the scene is an amalgamation of Bruegel’s travels through the Alps and his life in Antwerp and Brussels. The scene is apparently set in the Low Countries, but in the distance, Bruegel has included a distinctly-alpine mountain range that certainly wouldn’t exist in the Netherlands or Belgium.

I saw the painting for the first time in August of 2017 while studying abroad in Austria. My program included free entry to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and I made great use of my pass over the months that followed. Hunters in the Snow drew me like a moth to a flame—I was captivated by how effectively Bruegel captured both the wonder and fear that winter elicits. In the backdrop of the painting, peasants skate and play games on the ice. But in the foreground of the piece, hunters trudge through the snow, their shoulders sagging, the heads of their hunting dogs hanging low. The day’s hunt went poorly, and in spite of the cheerful play of the figures in the distance, the threat of hunger looms over the piece.

Hunters in the Snow is probably one of the most famous winter paintings in the world. You may be surprised to learn that not much is known about the artist who created it.

Historians know little of Bruegel’s early life. Researchers believe he was born around 1525 in the Netherlands, then under Habsburg rule. The year of Bruegel’s birth was approximated by the year he entered the Antwerp Painters’ Guild (1551); young men were typically admitted between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Bruegel earned the nickname “The Peasant” for his now-famous depictions of rural life, but it’s unclear if he himself was born into a peasant family. 16th-century writers offered different accounts of where Bruegel grew up—Lodovico Guicciardini claimed he was from Breda, while others stated he was from a nearby rural community.

With scant information regarding Bruegel’s background, some historians have argued that his wealthy clientele and humanist social circles indicate his education and upbringing in an urban environment. I will not make a claim here; on one hand, it is unlikely that the son of a feudal peasant would become one of the defining figures of the Northern Renaissance. Then again, many have tried to argue that Shakespeare couldn’t be the true writer of his plays, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, because he was the son of a tradesman—or, that he was really an aristocrat in disguise. For some, the idea that England’s greatest playwright wasn’t a member of the upper class was too much to bear.

Whatever his origins, Pieter Bruegel the Elder is famous today for his lively, often crowded paintings of peasants engaging in everyday activities, from the revelry depicted in Children’s Games (1560) to the hardships of winter in the countryside in Hunters in the Snow. The latter was part of a series of six paintings called The Months, in which Bruegel captured the transitions of the seasons in an imagined rural setting. As you might have guessed, Hunters in the Snow is my personal favorite.

A few key developments set the stage for this work to come into the world. The Northern Renaissance (stretching roughly from the late-1300s to the late-1500s), like the Italian Renaissance, saw artists move towards depicting the world realistically and achieving far greater naturalism than their medieval counterparts. But a major shift in subject matter would arrive in the 1500s. With the advent of the Protestant Reformation, the religious art prominent within Catholic churches were now regarded as idolatrous by converts, and the industry for commissioned altarpieces dried up in Protestant regions. Artists needed to find other sources of income. Portraits grew in importance for their livelihoods, as did pastoral landscapes. This interest in landscapes, once popular in decorating Roman buildings but declining during the Middle Ages, made a roaring comeback in European art. With his vivid, witty scenes, Bruegel was poised for success, and Hunters in the Snow has remained a beloved work ever since.  

Evening Snow at Kanbara, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō." Utagawa Hiroshige, ca. 1833-34. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While landscapes in European art waxed and waned in popularity, they remained a steady feature in East Asian art over the centuries. A prominent example of a wintry scene in Japanese art is Utagawa Hiroshige’s Evening Snow at Kanbara (1833-34), which was part of the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Like Hunters in the Snow, Hiroshige’s work is a dazzling winter scene. The beauty of the snow-covered trees and the mountains in the distance is offset by the figures in the foreground, hunched against the brutal cold. Like Bruegel’s choice to include an alpine scene in what is likely a Dutch or Belgian landscape, Hiroshige’s Evening Snow at Kanbara takes creative liberties with its setting; snow is a rare occurrence in the Kanbara region.

In order to create his idyllic landscapes, Hiroshige used bright colors with new pigments like Prussian Blue. He also relied on a gradation technique called bokashi to capture the sky at the top of his prints. Significant to his work, as with any artist, was the time in which he lived: in Hiroshige’s Japan, ordinary people had little freedom of movement. At the beginning of the Edo period, Japan had just emerged from two centuries of war and turmoil, cementing the ruling elite’s desire to maintain calm and control. Like Western feudalism of the medieval period, peasants in Edo Japan had limited access to travel and were required to obtain permission to journey outside of their communities. (Though it should be noted that people had ways of getting around these rules, such as claiming they were going on a religious pilgrimage.)

Hiroshige had the opportunity to travel the Tōkaidō highway in 1832 as part of the Shogun’s envoy. With this golden opportunity to visit communities all over Japan, Hiroshige was able to capture the joys and hardships of daily life in his prints. When I see the figures huddling close in Evening Snow at Kanbara, I recall the same bitter cold of Hunters in the Snow, a world away.

The Four Seasons “Winter,” Raqib Shaw ca. 2018-2019. © Raqib Shaw

Years later, standing in the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, I found another winter scene to add to my list of favorites. Kashmiri-British artist Raqib Shaw’s solo exhibition, Ballads of East and West, allowed visitors to revel in his intricately detailed, colorful world, where religious imagery of the East and West collide, and the violence and political upheaval he experienced as a child in Kashmir are met with the sublime beauty of the natural world.

In his series The Four Seasons (2018-2019), the viewer begins a visual journey with “Spring.” A young boy reads in the branches of a blossoming tree, overlooking a romantic vision of Kashmir’s lush, mountainous countryside. The scenes grow more chaotic with each season, until we reach “Winter.” The boy, now a grown man, has reached the top of the tree. Shining in a robe of gold, he tries to break free from the demons attacking him. The base of the tree writhes with the spirits of the dead, the agony of war playing out against an iridescent backdrop of the snow-cloaked Himalayas. The book, once read by a child in the innocence of spring, is strewn atop the sea of snow.

But there’s a little detail in the bottom-right corner of the painting that you might miss if you’re not looking carefully. Growing miraculously in the dead of winter is a small bunch of daffodils, the fragile promise of spring blooming in defiance of the cold.

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Art and Culture in Edo Japan

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