Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Coming home with a fox

Three hunters come over the brow of the hill with their dogs, heads down, spears over their shoulders; the only catch is a fox slung on the back of the first man. At the left, outside an inn whose sign hangs loose from one hinge, people tend a fire in the snow. Below, the land falls away to a village, a mill with its wheel frozen solid, and ponds crowded with skaters and players. Crows sit in the bare trees, one bird glides out over the valley, and in the distance rise jagged, Alpine peaks that belong nowhere in Flanders.

A picture of the year

Bruegel painted it in 1565 as one of a series of the times of the year that belonged to the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck. Five of the pictures survive, three of them in Vienna. The design runs on a long diagonal: the trees and the hunters lead down from the upper left, and the eye follows them out across the valley. The colour is held almost entirely to white, a cold green and the browns of the figures and trees.

Where it hangs

It hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and measures 117 by 162 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 6,819-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 45 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · Wikidata Q500985 · Wikimedia Commons