BRUEGEL, Pieter the Elder (c. 1525 - 1569)
1565Oil on panel
37 x 55,5 cm
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
The painting is sombre yet suffused with light. It shows a Brabant village scene. It is a holiday presumably and people are out, children especially, playing on the frozen river. On the far horizon, we can just
make out a city enveloped in mist. The little picture apparently breaks with traditional panoramas. The contrasting winter colours make the picture almost monochrome, a technique that would be repeated in Dutch winter
scenes for the next hundred years. The hilltop perspective of the painter is, apparently, traditional,
giving the work a timelessness quality. The landscape is painted with great
freedom, the paint apparently applied sometimes thickly and sometimes very thinly
in order to give the impression of the snowy and frozen scene and the dark colours
of the carefully positioned trees and vegetation. The experts are divided on whether Bruegel was assisted on this masterpiece. Scores of versions and numerous copies apparently exist, including at least one by Bruegel the younger, some of them as late as the 18th century.
The representations of winter scenes originated in the calendars of the Books
of Hours. This is apparently the first European independent winter scene (ie not in a series of seasonal landscapes). The winter of 1564-65 we know was particularly severe. There is probably a deeper meaning intended. This would be typical of art of the period. Perhaps we can think of a devout person as being a pilgrim travelling the river of life with its dangers and temptations. These have to be traversed to safely reach heaven. The bird trap in the right hand foreground (a door propped up by a stick with string attached) is symbolic of Satan's wiles, wiles that careless
souls (a bird often standing for the soul) may be caught out by. Life is a slippery and uncertain journey.
