The Hunters in the Snow

The painting belongs to a series of the months or seasons that Bruegel made in 1565 for the Antwerp merchant Nicolaes Jonghelinck; five survive and three of them are in this room. Look at the way the composition works. The dark trees and the hunters pull your eye from the top left corner down the slope into the valley, and the same diagonal is repeated by the roofs and the line of the frozen river. Bruegel uses only a handful of colours: white, grey green, brown and black, with a few red touches on the skaters. Even the smallest figures on the ice have their own gesture. One has fallen over; another pulls a sled; a man on the far bank hauls a load of brushwood across a bridge.

The series passed from Jonghelinck to the city of Antwerp, which gave it in 1594 to Archduke Ernst, governor of the Netherlands, and from him it came to Emperor Rudolf the Second and eventually to Vienna. Bruegel had probably never seen mountains like these before his journey to Italy over the Alps a decade earlier, and he combined Alpine peaks with a flat Flemish village to invent a landscape that never existed. The picture has been quoted in films by Tarkovsky and von Trier, and the lone bird gliding over the valley is one of the most imitated details in painting.

Did You Know? The bird in flight was painted so freely that it is often the first thing visitors say they remember, yet it is smaller than a fingernail.