A Chill In the Air

by David Moore

The scene seems, at first, idyllic as can be. It presents a vantage, in tranquil whites and blue-grays, of villagers ice skating and bustling in the distance, in a hushed winter light.

But a closer look at the hunting party returning to the village in the foreground reveals their dejection. They have around a dozen dogs with them, yet are bringing home only one fox and a small game bag. The dogs seem doleful, too; one looks back at the viewer in quintessential dog pity. Crows perch overhead and a lone magpie circles in the sky. A foreboding sinks in, that the frozen village may not have enough to eat. 

Hunters in the Snow was painted in 1565 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and is considered to be the first winter landscape painting—a smash hit that kicked off a genre of snow scenes in the Dutch Renaissance. The work is especially moving in its sensitivity to how human lifetimes are overlaid in times of catastrophe. People still play ice hockey, bandy over curling, pull one another by the hand on the frozen lake, start a cooking fire outside a run-down tavern, as the effects of natural forces play out implacably all around them. The painting inspires a consuming sense of precariousness: how bad are things going to get for the skaters of the village? 

The winter of 1564 was one of the coldest this part of the world had experienced in the Little Ice Age, a period of climate change that began around 1300 and lasted for centuries, some argue up to 1850. For the people of northern Europe, that winter was notably frigid, “harsh beyond measure” in the telling of one theologian. Severe storms and freezing winters killed a lot of people in those decades, with millions dying from famine when extreme weather ruined harvest after harvest. Bruegel’s wintry landscape is haunted by civilizational backsliding.