Bruegel in winter

bruegel1.jpg

The Hunters in the Snow (1565).

Most of the snow here in Manchester melted over Christmas but it’s likely there’ll be more on the way given the unusually low temperatures. Whatever the complaints about the weather, the empty-handed hunters painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–1569) had it worse. Of the two paintings, Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap is the lesser composition but seems slightly more optimistic.

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Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565).

I upgraded WordPress a few hours ago with the result that the latest version of the software no longer works with a couple of the plug-ins I was using. I try to keep WP plug-ins to a minimum but fell foul on this occasion so there’s now no tag cloud at the foot of the page until I work out a way to restore it by other means. If anything here seems awry or broken over the next couple of days, that’s the explanation.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Winter panoramas
Winter music
Winter light
La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters

4 thoughts on “Bruegel in winter”

  1. Actually There are two Breugel’s ‘Pieter the elder (the master) and ‘Pieter the son”. The pictures became popular only after the elder passed away. The younger copied his fathers paintings on a large (studio) scale, more popular, but with a lot less skill, expression and /or detail then his father mastered. Hence the differences.

  2. Hi Jean. The Brueghels were quite a family and there happen to be three Pieters, there’s a later Pieter III. Pieter the Elder, who created the paintings shown above, was the only one to drop the “h” from his name which usually helps when spotting his work although errors of attribution persist. I should note that I checked the details given here in The Oxford Companion to Art.

  3. Re: snow in Manchester – I went to the City Gallery on Dec 23rd specifically to see the Angels of Anarchy show only to be told it was closed that day. The reason? Condensation caused by low temperatures! I felt like one of Brueghel’s empty handed hunters…

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