Yuletide Greetings Across the Centuries
When Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted his famous ‘Christmas card’ winter landscape, he broke with tradition and inspired a new one…
Hunters in the Snow is an icon of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and rightly so. Skillful in its composition and use of colour, it seems a bridge between the medieval ‘book-of-hours’ and our modern ‘graphic-novel’ sensibilities. It’s considered the first large winter landscape of European art, often reproduced as a popular print — especially at this time of year, as a Christmas card.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted it in 1565 as part of a series depicting the months of the year, which was commissioned by wealthy banker and royal official, Niclaes Jonghelinck to decorate his Antwerp townhouse. Hunters in the Snow depicts a landscape in the depths of winter and was also known simply as January and nowadays is often called Bruegel’s Winter.
The ‘labours of the months’ were often used in illuminated books. One of the most outstanding examples created by the Limbourg brothers for the Duc de Berry’s Book of Hours, in the fifteenth century, and their ‘template’ was later adopted throughout Europe. Yet Bruegel brought a fresh vibrancy, an immediacy to his painting that still holds us enthralled.
