Hunters in the Snow

The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder was instrumental in developing landscape painting as a genre in its own right. Hunters in the Snow, 1565, is one of five surviving paintings (Bruegel painted six) in his cycle depicting The Labours of the Months. Populated by villagers, peasant workers, farmers, hunters and children, each painting is of a panoramic landscape at a different time of year. 

This chilly winter scene is a Christmas card favourite. But Bruegel is an artist whose work has also inspired art house directors, contemporary writers and modernist poets. Hunters in the Snow features in two Tarkovsky films, Solaris and The Mirror. More recently, it featured in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. That an image so closely associated with festive jollity should also be used in a way that underlines a sense of haunting unease isn't actually that surprising: Bruegel’s painting is powerful exactly because it provokes a sense of uneasy ambivalence.

It’s certainly an idealised scene, this snow-muffled land that dips steeply into a flat-bottomed valley where children in silhouette can be seen skating and playing ice hockey on a frozen lake. The spectacular peaks in the distance also make you wonder just how many mountainous ranges can be found in the Low Countries. Painted at a time of religious upheaval in the Netherlands, Bruegel was probably depicting country life how he imagined it once was, or how it should or could be.

Bruegel popularised the snowy landscape, influencing artists such as the deaf-mute painter Hendrick Avercamp, who specialised in jolly, silvery-hued scenes of ice-skaters, young, old, rich and poor. It was the epoch of the Little Ice Age, which chilled the Northern Hemisphere from the 16th to the 19th centuries (the Thames was last frozen solid in 1814, the year of the river’s last frost fair). In Hunters in the Snow one can almost feel the biting cold penetrate one’s bones, and even though most of the picture is taken up by landscape Bruegel has managed to give an extraordinary sense of light and space.

So what story does this painting tell? To our left, with their stooped backs presenting a strong outline against the snow and the light, we encounter the three hunters, trudging wearily through a carpet of white. Following close behind are their hunting dogs, each looking really rather sorry for itself. Two of the huntsmen are returning empty-handed, whilst a third, the most prominent, has only a dead fox hanging limply from his spear. It has been a disappointing day.

Further left, there is an inn, its wonky sign threatening to fall with just one gust of wind. Outside, a small group tend an open fire, which is beginning to look decidedly out of control. Everything feels a little provisional and precarious. A black bird is swooping low, while four are perched on branches. Do they convey a sense of foreboding? Cutting across the foreground in a sharp diagonal, and descending the snowy precipice, are the frost-dappled trees, their thin, black trunks rising high into the heavens, their branches creating a delicate pattern against the mint-grey sky. Beyond, the whole town is laid out dizzyingly before us, and indeed, there is something almost vertigo-inducing in this scene. It is both exhilarating and slightly unsettling.

This is a painting that offers us the light and shade of human existence. Bruegel’s hardy peasants toil through long, bitter winters, often gaining little or no reward. We see, however, that there is also delight to be had from being part of the cycle of nature. The tired hunters look down at a joyful, playful scene, but play no part in it themselves. Joy is ephemeral – or perhaps like the children on the ice, it belongs just over there, out of reach. We can chase it, but there are no guarantees. We might even catch snatches of it, but, like snow, it is likely to evaporate.



War has been the defining challenge for artists, as for society, for virtually all of history. And for most of the last century and a half the painting and sculpture have vied with photography as the means of best expressing its reality and its consequences. Nowhere more so than in the American Civil War.

Before then it was possible to picture a battle within the frame of a painting. It was not that artists ignored the horrors of war. Goya depicted the ravages of the decade-long Peninsular War in a series of engraving that have never been equalled for their honesty and their anger at what it was doing to victim and perpetrator alike. Turner took a particularly mournful view of the dead and dying that remained on the field of Waterloo the day after. But the portrayal of war was largely left in the hands of the celebrators of the victorious: Benjamin West, Jacques Louis-David and others. War was terrible but it was also heroic.

The American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, changed all that. It was the first full-out conflict in which the mechanics and destruction overwhelmed the individual actions of men, the first to be fought in prolonged and unremitting trench warfare. It was also the first to be covered by the new art of photography. Roger Fenton had been out in the Crimea a decade earlier, in a conflict that had seen the first signs of machine over man, but his pictures were largely traditional in composition, capturing the landscape, the encampments and the troops but not the destruction. The American Civil War was different. As many as 200 photographers are thought to have taken pictures and, in the hands of the best of them, the full reality of what it did to body and place was brought home to the public.

The impact of the photographers and the efforts of the painters to find a way of responding to the cataclysm that had fallen on their country is the subject of a quite remarkable and searching exhibition, The Civil War and American Art, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. It is not a grand show. It is certainly not a comprehensive one. But what it does is to give a sense of the actuality that was now being shown by the photographers and the struggle traditional painters had in trying to respond in their own way to the conflict about them.

The photographs – new to me – taken by George Barnard of the devastation wreaked by Sherman's famous March to the Sea are stark evocations of the ruination of war. Alexander Gardner's shots of the dead after the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg are as great and as grim as any photographer achieved in the European world wars or Vietnam.

Painters couldn't compete with that, nor did they try. There were those, such as Thomas Buchanan Read and Fabrino Julio, who attempted to crown the conflict with works that glorified the heroism and the generals. But the Smithsonian, which eschews them, makes the point that these seemed archaic even then. By the time war broke out, American artists had moved away from painting in the European Grand Manner. Instead, they preferred landscape painting as a means of expressing the unique character of American "nature" and a folksy genre painting to describe its people. That hopefulness and fondness couldn't survive the war, for all the first belief that it would all be over in few weeks or months.

The skies of the painters became darker, the clouds more threatening, the mood more melancholy. Our Banner in the Sky painted by Frederic Edwin Church, the finest landscape artist of the day, as war broke out in 1861, has the sky violently streaked in red show. His pictures from a visit to the far north of the same period show nature, majestic but remorseless in its solitude, with man's presence puny and perished. Sanford Robinson Gifford's Twilight in the Catskills from the same year paints a picture of eerie silence, the sky dark red and the trees in the foreground bare of leaves and branches. A haunting pairing of two views of precisely the same spot, Paradise Rocks, Newport, painted by John Frederick Kensett in 1859 and then in 1865, has the former peopled with ducks and aglow with the sunrise while the latter is without life and only a dim light coming from behind lowering clouds.