Bruegel the Elder and winter landscapes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qElLxc7rWxw

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and winter landscapes | The Invention of the White Christmas #bruegel

Art History Girl
Jan 21, 2021  GLASGOW

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s winter landscapes were the first snowscapes depicted in European art. In Hunters in the Snow, there are figures skating on frozen rivers, playing early versions of ice hockey and some people even trying to catch birds. They seem to be making the most of the freezing weather and having a lot of fun - but that might not be the whole picture. For the artist and the ordinary people in Bruegel’s works, these images weren’t just about having an enjoyable winter, this cold weather would have been scary and threatening to their very existence.
 
When these paintings were made, Europe was living through a period of intense climate change now known as the “Little Ice Age.” The term was first used in 1939 to describe a period of 4 thousand years, but it’s since been narrowed down to identify  a period of intense cooling between roughly 1400 and 1850. Within this timeframe, many say the 1560s was the first decade of extreme weather, and the winter of 1564–65 is said to be the coldest winter of the century. Hunters in the Snow and Bruegel’s other famous snow scenes—including “Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap” and “The Census at Bethlehem” were all painted around that freezing winter. The theologian Johannes Molanus recorded that winter as being “harsh beyond measure”.

During the 1560s, food shortages were almost yearly and there were riots and illness throughout Europe. Because most people were still extremely religious, many thought the destruction of their crops or the death of their children were punishments from God - and some blamed witchcraft for their terrible luck. Over 30 years later, King James I’s treatise on witchcraft, Demonology, mentioned the use of magic to make the weather worse. In Hunters in the Snow we can see some of this hardship. Three men and their dogs are trudging home from a hunting expedition - they’re soggy, exhausted, and hunched against the cold. Their body language gives us a really good idea of how they’re feeling both emotionally and temperature-wise.

Very little is known about Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his background. One of his biographers assumed he came from a peasant background which would justify his fascination with peasant life and why there are so many ordinary people in his work. More recent scholars believe Bruegel was “a townsman and a highly educated one” and that he would have moved in highly educated circles. Although this is likely it would seem that "he hadn’t mastered Latin", and he relied on other people to add the Latin captions to some of his drawings.
It’s thought he began his artistic training around 1545, when he was in his early twenties - and after 6 years of being an apprentice, he became a master painter and he joined the artist’s union, the guild of St Luke in Antwerp.  Not long after becoming a master artist, Bruegel took a journey across Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance, which was a fairly common excursion for Northern Renaissance artists.
It seems as though he wasn’t impressed by their dramatic scenes, idealised figures and their love of classical architecture. However, on his journey home, Bruegel took a route back through the alps and these incredible mountains seemed to impress him a lot more.  After Bruegel’s death in 1604, the biographer, Van Mander wrote “While he visited the Alps, he had swallowed all the mountains and the cliffs, and, upon coming home, he had spit them forth upon his canvas and panels.” Whilst on the road, Bruegel did a lot of drawings and sketches which he used for later paintings and from this moment on, nature and man’s relationship with it seemed to fascinate him. This influence can be seen in Hunters in the Snow where Bruegel has painted alpine mountains in the background. The low countries are very flat so Bruegel has invented these peaks to make the composition seem more dramatic.