Name: Hunters in the Snow: Pieter Bruegel: Great art Explained
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T06:35:27.000Z
Duration: 16 min 54 s
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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.

Pieter Brueghel 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 modernize.

Hungry Hunters in the Snow might evoke a picture perfect winter's day, full of charm and nostalgia 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 center 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.

Brueghel 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 bildenstorm, or breaking of the statues.

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.

Brutal winters, poor harvests and hunger in the countryside, 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 Brueghels, 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 Brueghel 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

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.

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 best seller 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.

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

Brueghel 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 humor, but it is humor 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.

Bening'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 Brueghel 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 Yongerlinck.

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 Yongerlinck'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 Yongerlink 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.

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Hunters in the Snow: Pieter Bruegel: Great art Explained

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