8/18/2023 0 Comments European landscape paintings![]() The popularity of landscapes in the Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a now Protestant (Calvinist) society, which preferred non-religious themes such as still life, genre painting, and landscape painting. He also started a vogue for Netherlandish winter painting. He created the first nativity scene to include snow, Adoration of the Magi in a Winter Landscape, which is also the earliest known painting to actually depict falling snow. īruegel continued to depict snow in his paintings. The paintings by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder were on a larger scale than calendar paintings they measured approximately three feet by five feet (0.9 by 1.5 meters). The series was commissioned in 1565 by a wealthy patron in Antwerp, Niclaes Jonghelinck. The Hunters depicts village life in a snowbound Flemish setting, showing not only hunters with pikes trudging off with their dogs to seek game, but also villagers gathered around a fire, frozen ponds with skaters, and houses and churches in the distance – all against a fanciful backdrop of snow-covered mountains. In addition to the snowy Hunters (December–January), it included The Harvesters (August). It was part of a series that illustrated the months, something thematically similar to the traditional Flemish books of hours (e.g. It was early in the frigid winter of 1565 that Bruegel created The Hunters in the Snow, regarded as the first true winter landscape painting. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow, 1565, oil on wood, Kunsthistorisches Museum Crop failures, heavy snowfalls and advancing glaciers that consumed Alpine pastures and villages made the era a grim one for European peasants. ![]() For the next 150 years, northern European winters were comparatively snowy and harsh. The winter of 1564–1565 was said to be the longest and most severe for more than a hundred years – the beginning of a cold period in northern Europe now called the Little Ice Age. ![]() Snow was not depicted in art except where it had a context, such as in the winter months of calendars.ĭuring the Early Northern Renaissance and even more during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century, interest in landscape painting was increasing. Īt that time, landscapes had not yet developed as a genre in art, which explains the scarcity of winter scenes in medieval painting. Some snowy scenes also appear in a set of early 14th-century frescoes created by Master Wenceslas for the Bishop's Palace at Trento, showing people throwing snowballs at each other, and in a detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Effects of Good Government in the City and Countryside (1337–39). January and February were typically shown as snowy, as is February in the famous cycle of the Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, illustrated 1412–1416. These were often illuminated manuscripts such as Labours of the Months, a cycle of twelve paintings that illustrated the social life, the agricultural tasks, the weather, and the landscape for each month of the year. Since the early 15th century, wintry scenes had been represented by artists in parts of large sculptural works on churches and even on a smaller scale in private devotional scripts such as the book of hours, a devotional collection of texts, prayers and psalms. Because frequent snowfall is a part of winter in northern European countries, depiction of snow in Europe began first in the northern European countries. The first artistic representations of snow came in the 15th and 16th centuries. February, attributed to Paul Limbourg, or the "Rustic painter", 14, Musée Condé.Įarly European painters generally did not depict snow since most of their paintings were of religious subjects.
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