The Hunters in the Snow (The Return of the Hunters)

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The Hunters in the Snow (The Return of the Hunters): Pieter Brueghel the Elder

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Pieter Brueghel the Elder Oil Painting - The Hunters in the Snow (The Return of the Hunters)

Keywords: Hunters, Snow, Return, Hunters

Work Overview: The Hunters in the Snow (The Return of the Hunters)
Artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Year 1565
Type Oil on wood panel
Dimensions 117 cm × 162 cm (46 in × 63 3⁄4 in)
Location Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

The Hunters in the Snow (Dutch: Jagers in de Sneeuw), also known as The Return of the Hunters, is a 1565 oil-on-wood painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Northern Renaissance work is one of a series of works, five of which still survive, that depict different times of the year. The painting is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. This scene is set in the depths of winter during December/January.

The Hunters in the Snow, and the series to which it belongs, are in the medieval and early Renaissance tradition of the Labours of the Months: depictions of various rural activities and work understood by a spectator in Breugel's time as representing the different months or times of the year.

The painting shows a wintry scene in which three hunters are returning from an expedition accompanied by their dogs. By appearances the outing was not successful; the hunters appear to trudge wearily, and the dogs appear downtrodden and miserable. One man carries the "meager corpse of a fox" illustrating the paucity of the hunt. In front of the hunters in the snow are the footprints of a rabbit or hare - which has escaped or been missed by the hunters. The overall visual impression is one of a calm, cold, overcast day; the colors are muted whites and grays, the trees are bare of leaves, and wood smoke hangs in the air. Several adults and a child prepare food at an inn with an outside fire. Of interest are the jagged mountain peaks which do not exist in Belgium or Holland.

The landscape itself is a flat-bottomed valley (a river meanders through it) with jagged peaks visible on the far side. A watermill is seen with its wheel frozen stiff. In the distance, figures ice skate, play hockey with modern style sticks and curl on a frozen lake; they are rendered as silhouettes.

The 1560s was a time of religious revolution in the Netherlands, and Bruegel (and possibly his patron) may be attempting to portray an ideal of what country life used to be or what they wish it to be.

Writing in the "opinion" section of Nature, art historian Martin Kemp points out that Old Masters are popular subjects for Christmas cards and states that "probably no 'secular' subject is more popular than ... Hunters in the Snow".[1]

Hunters in the Snow is used extensively in Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's films Solaris (1972) and The Mirror (1974), and in Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia. It appears also in Alain Tanner's film Dans la ville blanche (1983). It was an inspiration for Roy Andersson's 2014 film A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.

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One of the most beautiful paintings in the world, Bruegel’s 1565 Hunters in the Snow (117 x 162 cm) has received much attention for the return of the trudging “weary hunters with drooping shoulders…turning their backs to the observer…characterizing the season” [1] at top left and the harmonious depth of the sweeping landscape accented in diagonals from upper left to lower right and up again at upper right. The warmth of the fire with brush burning contrasts with the frozen lakes and icy peaks. The gray-green sky is the color of lead with thick clouds that hide the dim sun during the short daylight. The hunters have not been very successful with a meager catch, likely only a single animal hanging from the poles.

The diagonal line of bare poplar or elm trees move the viewer’s eyes right to the edge of the foreground steep hill, repeated by the brown houses, behind them the gray bare wooded copses like holm oaks along the rounded hills, then pick up again at the bottom in a continuing line across the valley along the ice ponds. Famous for the realism of his landscapes with the interplay of humans and nature, Bruegel’s artistic plan hints how human activity adapts to an environment both majestic but indifferent, where we are only one part in contrast to the dead of winter where life is otherwise mostly still.

The inn on the left has its sign hanging by only one hook, waiting like the rest of the world for repair when life restarts. What water is trapped in the snow and ice ponds is mostly inaccessible. The mostly vertical foreground trees – contrasting with the far high horizon – are empty except for snow laying on the branches and a few black huddled birds, with one taking wing across the landscape high over the valley but still touching the far crags. The slight back sweep of the wings of the dark bird in flight with its long tail in contrast to the light background suggests to some a silhouetted kestrel, itself a hunter in the winter, but even if not, Bruegel as keen observer makes it likely this is a known bird. The village church bell towers echo but in orthogonal human fashion the ragged vertical peaks, both an antithesis and synthesis of human versus nature.

This painting has also inspired many ekphrases including a celebrated poem by John Berryman with the hunters “returning cold and silent to their town” – a transposition d’art [2] – and a world-famous short story by Tobias Wolff as well as multiple cinematic creations. Part of a Bruegel series on seasonal images, this one is winter and generally thought of as either December [3] or January [4], as representational calendars of art were a known precedent.

Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow offers a bird’s eye view of a world locked in winter that is nevertheless teeming with life, with hunters and their dogs and ice skating peasants and a wheeling crow and the busied preparations for the cold weather.

The painting, usually interpreted as a genre scene (an image of daily life), features a snow-covered landscape that recedes dramatically to a row of jagged mountains in the distance, all under a blue-grey sky. In the lower left corner a trio of hunters and their pack of dogs return from a hunt. Beside them is an inn, and its rust-colored bricks and the bright yellow fire in front of it are a striking contrast to the whites and grays and ashy blues that dominate the painting.

The branches of three large trees in the foreground fan out like black capillaries against the sky and a few crows keep watch over the scene. From the left side of the painting the land slopes down and to the right, and beyond the foreground the landscape drops away sharply. The extensive middle ground and background, rendered in minute detail, depicts the natural and manmade world: a person carrying a load of sticks over a bridge, figures ice skating on a frozen pond, the snow-covered roofs of houses, innumerable tiny bare trees, and—far in the distance on the right side—the grey and snowy mountains, whose rough peaks seem to scratch at the sky. The right side of the painting is thus an uninterrupted view across the snowy valley. We see everything so clearly—even way into the distance it’s possible to make out individual trees and rooftops—and so we sense the crisp and clear air of a winter day. Yet this is not at all an image from reality: there is no such landscape in the Netherlands (which is mostly flat and below sea level in some areas). Rather, Bruegel combined images from his surroundings—the inns and farmhouses and frozen ponds of Northern Europe—with a chain of jagged mountains reminiscent of the Alps, which he saw on a journey to Italy in the 1550s. The painting is thus a carefully constructed scene, drawn as much from the artist’s imagination as from his surroundings.

Bruegel’s paintings reward close viewing, and in some instances—like his Fall of Icarus, in which the figure of Icarus is nearly hidden in the background—careful looking is the only way to fully appreciate the complexity of the scene. This painting offers similar rewards: the longer and more attentively we examine the details the more we can draw from this image of a winter day.

The hunters and their dogs are the largest figures in the painting and their group takes up much of the lower left quarter of the image. But rather than a scene of triumph, Bruegel is showing us a rather unsuccessful hunt. The men trudge through the snow wearily; note, for example, how the figure closest to us leans forward slightly, as though using his own body to keep his momentum—and his spirits—going. Each man also has his head cast downward, in a pose reminiscent of defeat. Even the dogs appear downtrodden, as several in the extreme lower left hang their heads—a point exaggerated by their drooping ears.

carries back a trophy: a rather small fox. Furthermore, a trail of rabbit tracks in front of the foremost hunter suggests that more prey have recently escaped them.

Hunting rights and specially-bred hunting dogs were often associated with the aristocracy in the Northern Renaissance, and we see examples of such imagery in works like the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (left), a prayer book painted by the Limbourg Brothers for the Duke of Berry, the brother of the King of France.

Yet in Bruegel’s painting, the identity of the hunters is not so clear, as the rest of the painting’s inhabitants are peasants, most of whom seem to be enjoying the winter day. The figures in front of the inn are preparing a fire for the singeing of a pig—a traditional December activity—and in the distance people take pleasure in the frozen lake: ice skating, playing hockey or a form of curling, and pulling companions on sleds.

There is thus a certain idyllic quality to Bruegel’s portrayal of peasant life, and it may be that the hunters—whose bodies point us to the center of the painting—are more a means of guiding us into the painting rather than its primary focus (despite the title art historians have given the work).

Bruegel’s painting, with its bare trees and people bundled against the cold and hard-packed snow, is part of a long tradition in Northern European art of portraying the months of the year and the activities that occurred during each month. Among the most famous examples is the cycle found in the previously mentioned Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (above). In that manuscript’s small but incredibly detailed paintings, each month is represented in a full-page miniature with an outdoor landscape scene (except January, which shows an indoor feasting scene) and either a courtly or peasant activity, such as hunting one month and working the land in another.

In Bruegel’s case the paintings were commissioned by a wealthy Antwerp banker named Niclaes Jongelinck. Rather than twelve paintings, Bruegel’s cycle divided the year into six seasons (paintings for five survive—the other four are The Harvesters, Return of the Herd, The Gloomy Day, and Haymaking). He has also chosen to give as much or more emphasis to the landscapes than to the activities depicted, with particular attention paid to the shifting colors of the times of year, from dark brown to blues and greens to yellows. This image—of winter—is the last in the series, dominated by whites and pale blues. If we imagine how they might have been displayed together in a room in Jongelinck’s house the effect would have been a chromatic progression through the seasons.

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Pieter Brueghel the Elder

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