Breughel - Hunters in the Snow

Peter Brueghel the Elder, Flemish (modem Belgium), 1525-1569. Hunters in the Snow, 1565, oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

Brueghel is best known as a painter of crowded peasant scenes. To this writer he is more beloved as one of the greatest landscape painters in Westem art. He is akin to the Chinese landscape painters in the awesome sweep of his scenes and in the humble place which humanity takes in them. Here some hunters retum to their village in the dead of winter, their activities and those of the ice skaters in the distance almost as timeless and immemorial as the land itself. The viewer is led, step by step, into the stunning landscape by the diagonal directions of the hunters’ walk, the line of trees, and the bird silhouetted against the foothills of the distant mountains.

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