“Hunters in the Snow” Bruegel – Iconic Flemish Genre Painting

Imagine a winter scene: hunters return empty-handed from the hunt, villagers skate and slide on frozen ponds, and nobody looks up at you watching them from a bird’s eye view. This is one moment captured for eternity by the Northern Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1565 and in Habsburg hands since 1594, in Vienna since the imperial collections were brought together there. Let us look more closely.

Artist Abstract: Who Was Pieter Bruegel?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Flemish painter of the Northern Renaissance art period, born around 1525. His birthplace is not documented. The biographer Karel van Mander, writing in 1604, placed him in or near Breda in the southern Netherlands, and van Mander is also the source for his training under Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayken he later married.

Portrait engraving of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1572; Attributed to Johannes Wierix, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The earliest firm record of him dates from 1550 and 1551, when he was in Mechelen working alongside the painter Pieter Balten on an altarpiece that is now lost. He became a master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1551, then travelled to Italy, crossing the Alps and reaching Rome. Back in Antwerp by about 1555, he supplied drawings to the print publisher Hieronymus Cock, whose engravers turned his designs into prints sold across Europe; many of those designs are openly indebted to Hieronymus Bosch. He moved to Brussels in 1563 and died there in 1569.

He worked on commission throughout his career, became known above all for his landscapes, and is remembered as one of the last Renaissance artists of the North.

Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Context

Hunters in the Snow (1565) is a winter landscape with genre figures seen from the raised vantage point that runs through most of Bruegel’s landscapes. It is also one panel of a six-part cycle of the year, painted for one Antwerp patron, and made in the middle of one of the coldest stretches of European climate on record.

The Hunters in the Snow (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder; Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Contextual Analysis: A Brief Socio-Historical Overview 

The Protestant Reformation began as a protest against practices of the Catholic Church, among them the sale of indulgences under Pope Leo X. In 1517 Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg, disputing what the papacy was advocating, and the movement spread quickly into the Netherlands.

What matters for reading this panel is that the two confessions wanted different things from art, which is where our “Hunters in the Snow” analysis begins.

Reformed congregations in the Netherlands rejected images in churches altogether, and in 1566, the year after this panel was painted, the Beeldenstorm saw crowds strip Netherlandish churches of their statues and altarpieces. Catholic patrons carried on ordering saints and altarpieces. Between the two positions, Antwerp had a fast-growing market for pictures with no church function at all: landscapes, proverbs, peasant festivities and scenes of ordinary work, bought by merchants for their own walls. That is the market this painting was made for, and its patron was an Antwerp financier buying for the walls of his own country house, not for a church.

Children’s Games (1560) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder; Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bruegel painted moralising scenes and narratives, often building proverbs and idioms into the composition as figures you have to decode. Almost all Pieter Bruegel paintings are worked in this kind of detail, which asks the viewer to spend time on each part of the picture rather than take it in at once.

He later became known as “Peasant Bruegel” for the number of paintings in which he shows the everyday lives of country people. It has sometimes been argued that he was a peasant himself, but the documents point to an educated man moving among Antwerp humanists and collectors.

The Peasant Wedding (1566-1569) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder; Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Cycle of the Year: Five Surviving Panels

Hunters in the Snow was commissioned by Niclaes Jongelinck, an Antwerp merchant and financier, for his country house outside the city, where the set probably hung in a dining room. The cycle is usually reconstructed as six panels covering two months each, of which five survive.

Depicting the months of the year with their characteristic labours was a long-established tradition in Northern Europe, and Bruegel’s cycle is the point at which it moves out of the prayer book and onto the wall of a private house.

The tradition is at its richest in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (about 1412 to 1416), an illuminated manuscript begun for the Duke of Berry by the brothers Herman, Paul and Jean de Limbourg, whose calendar pages run through the twelve months with the work proper to each.

Labors of the months in Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1410s; Limbourg brothers and others, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

How the Panel Reached Vienna

• 1565: Painted for Niclaes Jongelinck’s country house outside Antwerp.
• 1566: Jongelinck pledges his sixteen Bruegel paintings, the seasons among them, as security for another man’s tax debt to the city of Antwerp.
• 1594: The city buys the panels for 1,400 guilders and presents them to Archduke Ernst of Austria, the incoming governor of the Netherlands.
• After 1595: Ernst dies, and the paintings pass to his brother Emperor Rudolf II and into the Habsburg imperial collections.
• Today: Three of the five surviving panels, this one included, are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Formal Analysis: A Brief Compositional Overview

Below we look at the subject matter of Hunters in the Snow and at the means Bruegel used to tell the story of this wintery landscape. The scene looks idyllic enough to have been printed on a great many Christmas cards, but the winters behind it were not.

The conditions during this period were nothing like as comfortable as they appear from our vantage point.

From the 16th until as late as the 19th century, northern regions experienced what is now called the Little Ice Age: more ice and snow, shortened growing seasons, and disruptions to food production severe enough to cause famine. The winter of 1564 to 1565, immediately before this panel was painted, was one of the harshest of the century in the Low Countries, and it is generally taken as the prompt for the winter scenes Bruegel produced in these years.

Subject Matter

Starting from the bottom left corner of the composition we see three hunters and a pack of hunting dogs enter the scene. Both the men and the dogs appear subdued in their body postures, suggesting they did not have a successful hunt.

The only visible evidence from the hunt is the dead fox slung over the right shoulder of the man farthest from us. Evidence that escaped the hunters is there too, in the tracks of a hare in front of the hunter closest to us.

A detail of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565); Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

To the far left, four adults and a child tend a roaring fire outside an inn. They are singeing a pig, burning the bristles off the carcass, a task that belongs to the winter slaughter and one that manuscript illuminators had used for centuries to stand for the month of December. The inn’s sign hangs skew on a single hook. It shows a kneeling figure before a stag with a crucifix between its antlers, the vision credited to Saint Hubert and to Saint Eustace, both patron saints of hunters; the Dutch lettering beneath is worn, and readings of it differ.

The hunting group is approaching a snowy downward slope towards a small village. As we almost walk back to the village with them, we see crows perched on the tree trunks and flying off, and straight below frozen ponds. There is also a magpie flying towards the right side of the composition. The frozen ponds below appear divided into two sections with a snow-covered embankment in between. 

On the ice, people skate, spin tops, play a stick and ball game that is an ancestor of hockey, and slide heavy stones in the manner of curling; just below the sloping bank to the right, two figures are ice sledding, one pulling the other towards the small bridge.

A detail of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565); Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Walking across the small bridge towards the left is a woman with a heavy bundle of sticks on her shoulder. Not far from the ice sledders, a man works at some tree branches. To the right in the background we see the looming, jagged tips of snowy mountains with scattered trees, and indications of other houses and buildings fading into the haze.

Bruegel did not paint this view from a real location. He assembled it from places he knew, and the peaks on the right owe more to the Alps he crossed on his way to Italy than to anything within a hundred miles of Antwerp.

If We Zoom In

As with most of Bruegel’s paintings, the rewards are in the small figures, and they go unnoticed unless you spend time on them.

In the far distance, right behind the church steeple, flames come out of a house chimney and several men are trying to bring the fire under control. Two are already climbing a ladder towards the chimney, one stands on the ground with another ladder, and two more approach with a third across the small arcing bridge.

Other details include the frozen watermill, a figure on the far bank shooting at birds with the muzzle flash visible, and, further off still, another village of scattered houses.

Where to Look: A Viewing Checklist

The details above are easy to read past once, so here they are gathered as a single list to check off against the reproduction, in roughly the order a viewer moving from foreground to background would meet them.

• The three hunters and their dogs, both subdued in posture, entering at bottom left.
• The dead fox slung over the shoulder of the farthest hunter, the only game they carry.
• Hare tracks in the snow in front of the nearest hunter, evidence of the one that got away.
• The inn sign hanging skew, showing the stag-and-crucifix vision of Saint Hubert or Saint Eustace.
• The adults and child singeing a pig over the fire outside the inn.
• Crows in the bare trees and a magpie in flight over the valley.
• Skaters, a stick-and-ball game, and curling-style stone sliding on the frozen ponds.
• Two figures ice sledding toward the small bridge.
• The woman crossing the bridge with a bundle of sticks, and the man working at tree branches nearby.
• The chimney fire behind the church steeple, with men and ladders fighting it.
• The frozen watermill and, further off, a figure shooting at birds.

Hunters in the Snow Symbolism

The painting carries no inscription that fixes its meaning, and readings of it turn on the gap between human effort and the weather. The usual one takes the empty-handed hunters, the bare trees and the sheer scale of the frozen valley against the size of the figures as a statement about how little human effort counts for in deep winter, when survival is out of anyone’s hands.

A second reading works from the same evidence in the other direction. Everyone in the picture is busy and coping: the fire is lit, the pig is being prepared, the skaters are out, the chimney fire is being fought, the birds are being shot at. On this account the panel is less about helplessness than about a community that knows what winter requires of it.

Color and Light

The colors Bruegel used consist mostly of pale greens for the sky and the river and whites for the snow, with darker notes scattered across the buildings, the dogs, the trees, the birds and other objects.

Some of the buildings to the left are painted in a darker yellow, which sets up a contrast with the white of the snow next to it, and the only real warmth in the picture is in the oranges and yellows of the fire.

This combination produces the ambiance of a cold, overcast day and carries the gloom of winter, while the villagers themselves go about their business with a striking calm.  

A detail of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565); Karmakolle, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Perspective

The depth in Hunters in the Snow is built by the four trees in the foreground, which line up one behind the other and lead our gaze down the hill. The second row of trees further down the slope, just peeking into view, continues the same movement.

The result is a diagonal that carries the eye from the top left corner down the slope, across the frozen ponds and out to the flat land and mountains in the distance.

It is as if we stand on the elevated ground that closes the composition on the right. This points to a habit that runs through Bruegel’s landscapes: the viewer is placed above the scene, looking down into it, close enough to read the figures but never among them.

Perspective in The Hunters in the Snow (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder; Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What Came After: Influence and Afterlife

Both of Bruegel’s painter sons carried the work forward: Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who made copies and variants of his father’s compositions that account for much of their circulation, and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Bruegel’s landscapes also fed into Dutch Golden Age painting of the 1600s, with its appetite for the local countryside and for winter scenes in particular.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder mattered to later painters as a collectible as much as a model: Peter Paul Rubens owned several of his paintings, and drew on his peasant subjects in his own late landscapes.

The panel has had a second life outside painting. Andrei Tarkovsky put it on screen in Solaris (1972) and returned to Bruegel in Mirror (1975); Lars von Trier used it in the opening of Melancholia (2011), and Roy Andersson worked from Bruegel’s raised viewpoint in A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). Tobias Wolff borrowed the title for his short story Hunters in the Snow (1981), William Carlos Williams wrote the painting into his sequence Pictures from Brueghel (1962), and Michael Frayn built the novel Headlong (1999) around the missing spring panel of the very cycle this painting belongs to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow Mean?

There is no single agreed meaning, and nothing in the panel fixes one. The reading most often given takes the empty-handed hunters, the bare trees and the scale of the frozen valley as a statement about how small human effort is against a hard winter. A competing reading points out that every figure in the picture is coping rather than failing: the fire is lit, the pig is being prepared, the chimney blaze is being fought, the skaters are out. Both readings come from the same details, which is part of why the painting holds up.

Who Commissioned Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow Painting?

Niclaes Jongelinck, an Antwerp merchant and financier, commissioned it in 1565 as part of a cycle of the seasons for his country house outside the city. He did not keep it long: in 1566 he pledged his Bruegel paintings as security for another man’s tax debt to Antwerp, and the city ended up with them. Five of the six panels survive, three in Vienna, one in Prague and one in New York, and the spring panel is lost.

What Is Hunters in the Snow?

Hunters in the Snow is an oil painting on oak panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, made in 1565, showing three hunters returning empty-handed above a snowbound village. It measures 116.3 by 162.5 centimeters and belongs to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Is It Spelled Bruegel or Brueghel?

Both spellings are correct, for different people. The artist signed his early work “Brueghel” and dropped the h from 1559 onwards, so “Pieter Bruegel the Elder” is the standard form for the painter of this panel. His sons kept the h: Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. A winter scene close to this one but signed “Brueghel” is often a copy or variant by the younger Pieter.

How Much Is Hunters in the Snow Worth?

It has no market value, because it cannot be bought. The panel belongs to the Austrian state collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and is not for sale at any price. The last recorded transaction involving it was in 1594, when the city of Antwerp paid 1,400 guilders for the seasons panels in order to present them to Archduke Ernst of Austria. Around forty paintings are generally accepted as Bruegel’s own work and nearly all are in public collections, so comparable sales barely exist.

Alicia du Plessis( Author and Art History Expert )

Alicia du Plessis is a multidisciplinary writer. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Art History and Classical Civilization, as well as two Honors, namely, in Art History and Education and Development, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. For her main Honors project in Art History, she explored perceptions of the San Bushmen’s identity and the concept of the “Other”. She has also looked at the use of photography in art and how it has been used to portray people’s lives.

Alicia’s other areas of interest in Art History include the process of writing about Art History and how to analyze paintings. Some of her favorite art movements include Impressionism and German Expressionism. She is yet to complete her Masters in Art History (she would like to do this abroad in Europe) having given it some time to first develop more professional experience with the interest to one day lecture it too.

Alicia has been working for artincontext.com since 2021 as an author and art history expert. She has specialized in painting analysis and is covering most of our painting analysis.

Learn more about Alicia du Plessis and the Art in Context Team.