Form

Trees get smaller and smaller like they’re marching

Repetition of trees help lead our eyes to the people on the ice/street

No real middle ground as we move into deep space

No identity to the figures

Men come from an unsuccessful hunt, at the mercy of the seasons, dogs tired and exhausted coming home to the scenery of people enjoying the winter

Trees are barren and birds are encircling their heads

Sense of muted/ neutral colors

Strong sense of diagonals and vertices, trees leading us into the town

Function

Made for Nickles Jonghelink and Antwerp Banker who was an art collector and a merchant

He had asked Brugal for six paintings that represented deep seasons throughout the months

• Deep Winter

• Early Spring

• Late Spring (missing)

• Early Summer

• Late Summer

• Fall

A return to nature in an ideal life to assist with change

Life is difficult but life can be enjoyable; God will prevail

Seasons and how people are working in nature

Showing the life of peasants; the norm

Content

Depicting landscape in which people find difficulty and happiness with it

Landscape given meaning with daily routines of people who inhabit it

Deep winter scene

Netherlandish painting, similar to great wave; “How does man survive?”

In theory we are a bird moving through the landscape

Stresses of winter, men trudging through snow, women with a fire at an inn, joy, daily tasks, ice skating, families, dogs, and sky; Wonder of God

Context

FIrst time in history of Western painting that landscape has been brought to scale

Time of great change in North as a result of protestantism

• Dutch genre scenes showed normalcy and tradition even in times of great change

1565 (date of creation) was 1st year of a really awful winter as a result of the Little Ice Age (1550-1700)

• Caused by the literal cooling of the Earth after the decimation of the Native Americans

• This is because Natives used slash-and-burn agriculture = essentially, this created a kind of global warming which warmed the Earth

• When arrival of Europeans leads to deaths of Native Americans, the world literally cools and there is no more slash-and-burn agriculture occuring

Learning Objective

16th c. Northern Genre Scene

Themes

• Man v Nature

• Landscape

• Genre