The Hunters in the Snow

Based on Wikipedia: The Hunters in the Snow

A Bad Day of Hunting, Frozen in Time

Three hunters trudge home through the snow. Their dogs are gaunt, ribs showing beneath matted fur. One man carries a single fox carcass—pathetic spoils for what was clearly an exhausting expedition. In the snow ahead of them, fresh hare tracks mock their failure. The rabbit got away.

This scene of defeat, painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1565, has become one of the most beloved winter images in Western art. It hangs today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, but its influence extends far beyond gallery walls—appearing in films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Lars von Trier, inspiring poetry by William Carlos Williams, and gracing countless Christmas cards each December.

What makes a painting of failed hunters so enduringly popular?

The Little Ice Age Begins

Bruegel painted The Hunters in the Snow at a pivotal moment in European climate history. The year 1565 marked the beginning of what scientists now call the Little Ice Age—a period of unusually harsh winters that would grip Europe for the next several centuries. Rivers that rarely froze became highways of ice. Growing seasons shortened. Famines followed.

Bruegel couldn't have known he was documenting the start of a climate shift. But he captured something essential about winter's cruelty and beauty that resonates across the centuries. The painting shows a world held in suspension, frozen in more ways than one.

The colors tell the story. Muted whites and grays dominate. The trees stand skeletal, stripped of leaves. Wood smoke hangs motionless in the cold, still air. There's no wind in this painting, no movement except the weary plodding of the hunters descending the hill.

Reading the Details

Bruegel packed his canvas with small narratives that reward close attention. Near the hunters, several adults and a child gather around an outdoor fire at an inn, preparing to singe a pig—a traditional method of removing hair before butchering. The inn's sign hangs crooked, nearly detached from its hardware, reading "Dit Is Gulden Hert"—This Is the Golden Hart.

That sign is no random detail. The hart, or deer, references Saint Hubertus, patron saint of hunters. Legend holds that Hubertus was a nobleman obsessed with hunting who encountered a magnificent stag with a crucifix glowing between its antlers. The vision converted him to Christianity, and he eventually became a bishop. By invoking Hubertus on an inn sign in a painting about unsuccessful hunters, Bruegel adds a layer of gentle irony—or perhaps a subtle reminder that there are more important things than a good day's catch.

Crows perch in the bare branches overhead, and a magpie flies through the upper portion of the scene. In Dutch culture of Bruegel's time, magpies carried dark associations—they were connected to the Devil himself. Whether Bruegel intended an ill omen or simply observed the birds that actually appear in winter landscapes, their presence adds an unsettling note to the otherwise peaceful scene.

Impossible Mountains

Here's something strange about The Hunters in the Snow: the dramatic jagged peaks rising in the background don't exist anywhere in the Low Countries. The Netherlands and Belgium, where Bruegel lived and worked, are famously flat. The highest point in the Netherlands barely reaches a thousand feet.

Bruegel traveled to Italy in his youth, crossing the Alps, and the experience clearly marked him. Those impossible mountains represent something beyond geographic accuracy—they transform a local Flemish village into a universal winter landscape, somewhere between observation and imagination.

The valley below the peaks holds a frozen lake where tiny figures skate, play kolf (an ancestor of both golf and hockey, played on ice), and throw stones in a game called eisstock, similar to modern curling. These distant skaters are rendered as simple silhouettes, yet each one carries the suggestion of individual motion and life. A watermill sits frozen, its wheel locked in ice, reminding us that winter stops work along with water.

Part of a Larger Cycle

The Hunters in the Snow wasn't painted as a standalone work. It belongs to a series depicting different times of the year, following a tradition that stretches back to medieval illuminated manuscripts. These "Labours of the Months" showed the agricultural and seasonal activities that structured rural life—planting, harvesting, slaughtering, resting.

Of Bruegel's original cycle, five paintings survive today. The Hunters in the Snow represents December and January—the dead of winter. The Gloomy Day captures the uncertain thaw of February and March, when winter hasn't quite released its grip. The Hay Harvest shows the golden work of June and July. The Harvesters depicts the August and September grain harvest. The Return of the Herd follows cattle being driven home in October and November.

A drawing for a spring scene also exists, suggesting Bruegel intended to paint April and May as well. He never completed it himself, but after his death in 1569, his son and other artists created dozens of painted versions based on his design. The fate of any other missing paintings—if they ever existed—remains unknown.

An Ekphrastic Legacy

Ekphrasis is a Greek term for poetry or literature that describes visual art—when words attempt to capture what paint has already rendered. The American modernist poet William Carlos Williams wrote an ekphrastic poem titled "The Hunter in the Snow" (note the singular hunter), part of his collection "Pictures from Brueghel." Williams approaches the painting with characteristic directness, stripping away interpretation to focus on pure description, letting readers reconstruct the image in their minds. The poem, like the painting, finds power in accumulation of detail rather than grand statement.

From Canvas to Screen

The Hunters in the Snow has drawn filmmakers with a particular fascination for slow cinema and visual meditation. The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, known for films of almost hypnotic deliberateness, used Bruegel's painting in his 1972 science fiction masterpiece Solaris. During a zero-gravity scene, the camera lingers on the painting while Bach's organ prelude BWV 639 plays—a moment of earthly beauty aboard a space station orbiting an alien ocean.

The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami made the painting the opening "frame" of his final film, 24 Frames, released posthumously in 2017. Kiarostami's concept was simple and strange: take still images—photographs and paintings—and use digital animation to imagine what might have happened just before or after the moment captured. His Hunters in the Snow comes to life as dogs shift, birds fly, and snow gently falls, while the hunters remain frozen in their eternal trudge home.

Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia, about depression and the end of the world, returns to the painting multiple times. For von Trier, Bruegel's winter landscape seems to represent a kind of emotional truth about despair—the beauty that persists even when everything feels hopeless, the world continuing its cycles regardless of human suffering.

Winter as Metaphor

Art historian Martin Kemp, writing in the scientific journal Nature, observed that Bruegel's painting has become perhaps the most popular secular subject for Christmas cards. This is curious when you think about it. The painting shows failure, weariness, and the grinding difficulty of survival in a harsh season. Nothing about it is explicitly festive or celebratory.

Yet something about The Hunters in the Snow speaks to what winter actually feels like—not the sanitized snow globes and jingling bells, but the real experience of cold days growing shorter, of effort yielding meager returns, of community huddling together against the dark. The skaters on the distant pond remind us that even in the depths of winter, there is play. The inn's fire offers warmth. The hunters are going home.

Bruegel painted other winter scenes that became equally famous. His Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters and Bird Trap, also from 1565, shows villagers skating beneath a tree where a simple trap has been set—a door propped up with a stick, ready to fall. Some art historians see this as a memento mori, a reminder of death's sudden arrival. Others see it as simply accurate observation of winter life in the Low Countries.

The Survival of Beauty

Pieter Bruegel the Elder died in 1569, just four years after painting The Hunters in the Snow. He was likely in his early forties. His sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder, both became successful painters themselves, often copying and elaborating on their father's compositions. The spelling of the family name shifted—the elder Bruegel dropped the "h" that his sons retained—a small reminder of how even names are mutable across generations.

The painting passed through various collections before reaching the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where it has hung since the museum's founding in 1891. It has survived wars, including two world wars that devastated Europe. It has outlasted empires, ideologies, and countless winters.

And still those hunters trudge home through the snow, their dogs exhausted, their game bag nearly empty. Still the skaters glide on the frozen pond below. Still the smoke rises from the inn where a pig is being prepared for butchering. Still the mountains that shouldn't exist rise impossibly against the gray sky.

Five hundred years later, we look at Bruegel's bad day of hunting and see ourselves—tired, perhaps disappointed, but heading home nonetheless, while somewhere in the distance, despite everything, people are playing on the ice.