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The Hunters in the Snow

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

The Hunters in the Snow is a winter landscape painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1565. It belongs to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where visitors can see up close how Bruegel built a whole frozen world around three tired hunters coming home.

Where to see it

The Hunters in the Snow is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which is also its listed location. The painting measures 117 × 162 cm, so it is large enough to reward both a step back for the overall composition and a closer look at the small figures. Display arrangements can change, so check the Kunsthistorisches Museum's official website for current display status before you visit.

What to look for in person

The hunters on the hill

Start in the lower left foreground. Three hunters trudge through deep snow with a pack of dogs, heads down and backs bent, and their haul looks meagre: one carries what appears to be a single fox. Look at how their dark silhouettes and the footprints behind them stand out against the white ground. Bruegel gives no heroic moment here; the scene reads as the weary end of a hard day, and that mood sets the tone for the whole picture.

Life around the inn

To the left of the hunters, an inn stands at the edge of the slope. Its signboard hangs loose and tilted from a single fixing, a small detail that is easy to miss. In front of the building, a group of people tend a large open fire, apparently preparing food. The flames and smoke are among the few warm notes in the cold palette, and they draw your eye back toward the human activity on the hilltop before the view drops away into the valley.

The valley, the ice and the mountains

Follow the line of bare trees down the diagonal into the valley. Below lie frozen ponds dotted with tiny figures skating, playing games and walking across the ice. Further away are villages, a mill and, on the horizon, sharp, jagged peaks. Notice the restrained colours: the whites of the snow against a cold, greenish-grey sky and ice. A dark bird gliding over the valley helps lead your eye from the foreground hill out into the deep, wide landscape.

About the painting

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Hunters in the Snow in 1565. It is one of his best-known landscapes and is widely understood as part of a series of paintings showing different times of the year, a theme with roots in the calendar illustrations of earlier Netherlandish manuscripts. Bruegel took that tradition and expanded it into a large panel-scale view, here 117 × 162 cm, in which the season itself becomes the main subject.

What makes the picture compelling in the gallery is the way it is organised. The high viewpoint on the left lets you stand, in effect, beside the hunters and look out over everything they are returning to. A strong diagonal of trees and figures runs from the upper left down into the valley, guiding the eye from the close, heavy forms of the foreground to the small, busy figures on the ice and finally to the distant mountains. The contrast between the struggle of the hunters and the ordinary pastimes below gives the scene a quiet, observed realism rather than a single dramatic event.

Bruegel is also known for combining observed details of rural life with invented scenery. The craggy peaks on the horizon do not match the flat country of the Low Countries where he worked, and they are usually seen as an imaginative addition that broadens the view. Spend time with the small figures: much of the painting's character lies in these modest, everyday details. The work is held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Key facts

More by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

• Two Chained Monkeys — Gemäldegalerie Berlin
• The Beggars — Louvre Museum
• Netherlandish Proverbs — Gemäldegalerie Berlin
• The Land of Cockaigne — Alte Pinakothek
• The Fall of the Rebel Angels
• The Peasant Wedding — Kunsthistorisches Museum
• The Triumph of Death — Museo del Prado
• The Fight Between Carnival and Lent — Kunsthistorisches Museum
• Children's Games — Kunsthistorisches Museum
• The Harvesters — Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Dull Gret
• The Peasant Dance — Kunsthistorisches Museum

Sources

• Wikidata Q500985
• www.khm.at