Winter

Winter is a subject in art. The gallery holds 110 works in this subject in art, including works by Gustave Courbet, Jean Léon Gérôme and Camille Pissarro.

Winter entered Western art not as a subject in its own right but as a marker of time. In the medieval cycle of the Labours of the Months — the rural occupations assigned to each part of the year — February was the cold month, and it was here that the snow-covered landscape first appeared. The February page of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, illuminated by the Limbourg brothers around 1412–1416, is often called the first true snow scene in European painting: peasants huddle by a fire while a frozen world of white fields, bare trees and a smoking cottage stretches beyond.

Winter became a serious pictorial theme only in 1565, when Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Hunters in the Snow as part of a six-panel series of the seasons commissioned by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck. Created during one of the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age — the winter of 1564–65 was the harshest in over a century — Bruegel's panel fused the old calendar tradition with a vast, atmospheric panorama of weary hunters, skaters on green-grey ponds and snow-laden peaks. It established a vogue that the Dutch Golden Age made into a national speciality.

Hendrick Avercamp was the first painter to devote himself almost wholly to winter, populating idealised frozen rivers with brightly dressed skaters, sledges and falls. Aert van der Neer pioneered the moonlit and snowbound canal view — as in our Sports on a Frozen River — while Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten supplied topographical ice scenes such as Skating at Sloten, near Amsterdam. These works render winter through cool tonal harmonies, low horizons, high pearly skies and aerial perspective that fades distant figures into haze.

Romanticism reimagined the season as a vessel for feeling, Caspar David Friedrich charging his snow-bound ruins and bare oaks with melancholy and the sublime. The Impressionists then turned winter into an optical laboratory: fascinated by the effets de neige, the play of coloured light across white ground, Monet painted roughly 140 winter canvases, while Pissarro (The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning) and Sisley dissolved snow into flecks of blue, violet and rose — sealing winter's place as an enduring genre of its own.