CANVASES, CARATS AND CURIOSITIES

The calendar pages, which were often positioned at the beginning of the book, are among the earliest sustained visual records of winter. Organized by the months of the year, these illuminated cycles paired religious feast days with scenes of seasonal labor and domestic life. Winter months frequently depict snow-covered ground, bare trees and figures bundled against the cold. In the Golf Book of Hours, snow signals a pause in agricultural production, the hardship of the season and the cyclical rhythm governing both labor and devotion. From the blue-robed woman with a child, likely a reminder of the Nativity, to the scene’s lower border, where boys pull someone on a sled in an idealized view of peasants’ winter life.

Through these illuminations, medieval artists established a visual language in which winter landscapes anchored religious practice to the natural world, laying the groundwork for later, more naturalistic depictions of seasonal change in Northern European art.

The Très Riches Heures: Winter as Daily Life

One of the greatest illuminated books of hours ever created was the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The manuscript, created around 1410-1411 by the Limbourg brothers, was commissioned for John, Duke of Berry, the brother of King Charles V of France. The Duke of Berry was a lavish spender and patron of the arts; at the time of his death, his inventory included 15 other books of hours. This, however, was the most lavishly decorated with rare pigments and costly gold leaf.

On February‘s page, the snow is piled high in an arrestingly accurate depiction of the lived experience of deep winter in medieval France. On the left, three people are warming themselves by the fireplace indoors, while another tries to shield himself from the cold. While one man works hard cutting down trees, another guides a donkey loaded with firewood into town. The trees are entirely bare, the beehives are topped with snow and the smoke rises from the chimney. According to art historian Erwin Panofsky, this is credited as the first winter scene in the history of painting. 

On the opposite page, which lists the prayers for February, the upper quatrefoil further relates the season’s intense cold with the introspective act of prayer. A man, dressed from head to toe in layers, sits by the open-hearth fire and warms his hands. The Limbourg brothers’ careful observation of the natural world, with its weather, rhythms and seasonal labor, marks a decisive shift toward landscape as an active subject in its own right, rather than a neutral setting for human action.

In the centuries that followed, artists increasingly turned to winter landscapes not only to mark time, but to explore the relationship between labor and communal life in an increasingly urbanized world. It is within this lineage that Pieter Bruegel the Elder emerges.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Birth of the Snowy Landscape

By the mid-sixteenth century, winter imagery broke free from the confines of a manuscript page and asserted itself as an independent subject worthy of artistic inquiry. No artist was more instrumental in that shift than Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1530 to 1569). Known for his genre paintings, Bruegel the Elder elevated scenes of seasonal peasant labor and recreation through large-scale landscapes that balanced human activity with nature's overwhelming presence. Bruegel worked in the Netherlands during the Little Ice Age, a significant climatic event characterized by prolonged year-round cooling in Northern Europe that lasted from the 15th century to 1850.

In Bruegel’s winter scenes, one can see the harsh reality of the bitter cold. Hunters in the Snow (1565) stands as a defining moment in the history of snowy landscape art. As one in a series of works depicting different times of the year, Bruegel presents winter as an immersive environment that shapes every aspect of daily life. The painting’s visual impression is generally cold and brisk, with a color palette of muted whites, yellows and greys.

Hunters wearily trudge through the snow towards the village after an unsuccessful expedition, as evidenced by the lack of killed animals on their backs. A hare’s footprints precede their path; perhaps it is the very hare they were unable to catch. The frozen ponds are filled with skaters and the fire on the left side is the brightest color in the work, reflecting the necessity of fire’s warmth during this season. All are unified by the snow that blankets the terrain far into the horizon line.

Bruegel synthesizes the medieval tradition of seasonal imagery with a new, panoramic vision of the world. Here, the snowy landscape dictates labor and leisure, while the vast, frozen landscape dwarfs the human figures within it. This work also marks a decisive break from earlier devotional frameworks by establishing winter landscape painting as a genre in its own right; no prayer is in sight amidst the scene.

Romanticism: Snow, Sublimity, and Emotion

As artistic priorities shifted toward emotion and the inner life, the winter landscape took on new meaning. Within the context of Romanticism, artists turned to nature as a site of the sublime, a concept rooted in the overwhelming power of the natural world to inspire awe, fear and transcendence simultaneously. Snow-covered landscapes, with their vastness and apparent emptiness, proved uniquely suited to this exploration.

German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) stands as one of the central figures in this reimagining of winter. His landscapes often depict solitary figures dwarfed by expansive, frozen terrain, emphasizing humanity’s fragility in the face of nature’s immensity.

In works such as Winter Landscape (1811) and The Sea of Ice (1823–24), Friedrich uses snow and ice as arenas in which the viewer confronts isolation and mortality, suggesting a limit of human understanding. The cold, desolate beauty of these scenes harkens back to manuscript painting by encouraging an inward, emotional response, rather than a simple narrative.

For Friedrich, the sublime emerges through restraint. Muted palettes, stark compositions and expansive skies strip the landscape of anecdote, allowing feeling to take precedence over action. The Sea of Ice (1823-1824) depicts an Arctic landscape, with small icebergs layered on one another, seemingly forming towers of ice. A shipwreck is visible on the right side of the tallest ice tower, suggesting that nature is superior to men’s power.

In these Romantic visions, snow-covered mountains or meadows no longer illustrate how people endure the season, but how nature’s beauty and vastness can overwhelm the senses. Friedrich's paintings illustrate a closeness to nature that the Romantics sought to bring viewers closer to and, in doing so, helped pass the baton to future painters who painted en plein air.

Impressionism and Modern Approaches to Snow

As aesthetic trends shifted away from Romanticism’s focus on metaphysical intensity, some artists turned their focus to capturing the fleeting, sensory experience of the natural world. In the late nineteenth century, Impressionist painters embraced snow as a laboratory for studying light and color. Working en plein air, they painted directly from observation, seeking to capture the fleeting effects of weather and atmosphere as they appeared in a single moment.

Snow proved especially compelling for this pursuit. Its reflective surface absorbs and refracts surrounding colors, transforming white ground into a shifting field of blues, violets and warm pinks. Camille Pissarro, known as the Father of Impressionism, turned to snowy landscapes again and again, as in Snowy Landscape at Éragny with an Apple Tree (1895). In this small landscape, Pissarro paints the view from his studio’s window in the village of Éragny-sur-Epte in northern France. While the painting's luminous tone appears like a large expanse of white, a closer look reveals little to no use of pure white. The yellowy sun and its reflections on the ground and trees, the blue-grey hues of the sky and distant buildings, and the light pinks and purples mixed with white result in ample chromatic subtlety for a seemingly simple work.

Pierre Bonnard, inspired by the Impressionists, carried this exploration into a more modern register by moving away from direct observation. As a founder of the influential group Les Nabis, Bonnard was known throughout the 1890s for his colorful, highly complex interior scenes that infused the everyday with symbolic meaning. By 1900, however, he desired change and chose to leave the bustle of Paris and travel Europe with his friend Édouard Vuillard, finding new inspiration in the idyllic landscapes of France.

While Impressionists painted landscapes outdoors, Bonnard often worked from memory, reconstructing scenes long after first seeing them. In the painting La neige au Grand-Lemps (1910), Bonnard depicts the scenery of his childhood in Grand-Lemps. Unlike Pissarro, Bonnard embraced the brilliance of pure white and its elusive power to create form. He composes the entire painting around this color, carefully layering hundreds of subtle hues to bring the snow, ice and winter sky shimmering to life.

Unlike the other Impressionists, his work became subjective and intimate, shaped by emotional recall rather than atmospheric accuracy. Colors intensify, spatial logic loosens and the landscape feels lived-in rather than observed. Through Bonnard’s approach, snowy landscape painting shifts decisively from recording what the eye sees to expressing how a moment is remembered. As modern artists increasingly merged direct observation of snow with memory, winter landscapes opened onto new possibilities shaped by place, cultural identity and personal experience.

Snowy Landscapes in the 20th Century and Beyond

In the twentieth century, snowy landscape art continued to evolve as artists abstracted, simplified or stylized winter scenes to reflect modern life. In the United States, Guy Carleton Wiggins (1883-1962) emerged as one of the most celebrated painters of winter urban landscapes, particularly those depicting New York City. Wall Street, Winter (1930) is an ode to the wintry charm of the bustling financial capital. Snow blankets the street, with the famed Trinity Church rising in the distance and the Subtreasury Building at right, where the statue of George Washington stands prominently. The snow-covered street, blurred by falling flakes and glowing windows, and the buildings dissolve into the atmosphere. In Wiggins’s work, winter is used to create a calming mood that softens the experience of modern life.

On the other side of the Atlantic, French artist André Brasilier (b. 1929) conjures up feelings of harmony and connection with the winter world through dynamic brushwork and pulsating color. In the foreground, two stylized horses and their riders travel along a snowy trail. Framing them, an expanse of blue representing a grove of frozen trees vibrates with intensity of color. Much like Wiggins, the scene carries an ethereal, dreamlike quality, though far more vibrantly colored. The figures’ pink coat and high-contrast black horse evoke a sense of mystery and isolation while the loose, emotive brushstrokes bring the scene to life.

Across these varied approaches, the snowy landscape has become a place where memory and environment converged. From bustling city streets to quiet rural scenes, snow endures as a powerful element in art, capable of transforming the familiar into something contemplative, intimate and enduring.

Next time you find yourself caught in a snowstorm, think about how you would depict the scene in front of you. Would you try to illustrate winter’s ability to spur self-introspection, or would you focus more on displaying what you really see without the emotional context?

Explore more of our landscape fine art and don’t forget to go outside and enjoy nature!

Works Cited:

Koerner, Joseph Leo. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

Meiss, Millard. French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries. New York: George Braziller, 1974.

Panofsky, Erwin. Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.

Sutton, Peter C., ed. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.