Speakasso › Paintings › The Hunters in the Snow
The Hunters in the Snow
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1565
Three weary hunters and their pack of dogs trudge downhill toward a village; the whole bag is one thin fox slung over a shoulder. Below, people skate and play a kind of hockey on frozen ponds, a fire is lit outside an inn, and in the distance loom mountains Flanders never had. It is the January-February scene from a cycle of the seasons painted for an Antwerp banker. Bruegel was the first to make a winter landscape the hero of a picture, and his white hush with black silhouettes has defined winter ever since.
What is in the painting
- Bare branches. Black leafless trunks in the foreground cut across the pale sky.
- Frozen ponds. Below lie two big rectangles of ice dotted with tiny figures.
- Inn sign. At the left an inn sign hangs crookedly, with people lighting a fire beneath it.
Did you know? Of the six panels in the Seasons cycle five survive, and three of them hang in the same room in Vienna.
About the painting
- Artist
- Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525–1569)
- Year
- 1565
- Style
- Northern Renaissance
- Medium
- Oil on oak panel
- Size
- 117 × 162 cm
- Where to see it
- Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
How to describe it in Speakasso
In Speakasso you describe the painting in your own words and an AI draws it again. These words are forbidden in this round — each one costs 15 points:
A description that scores high
A winter scene seen from a hilltop. In the lower left, three tired men with spears trudge downhill with a pack of lean hounds, one carrying a thin fox. Tall bare black trunks with leafless boughs line the slope, dark crows perched on them. Below lies a valley with frozen ponds full of tiny skaters, a village and jagged peaks far away. White, grey-green and black under a pale greenish sky. Detailed old Flemish painting.
The tricky part: Say everything is covered in white, call the animals lean hounds, and describe tall bare black trunks with crows.
The method behind it: what is painted first, then where things are, then colour and light, then the style. Read the full guide
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