A spirit to warm Bruegel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’

The ostensible subject matter is misleading, as is any conflation with his lesser relatives’ wassailing peasants and roistering village squares. But Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work is profoundly serious. It has a formidable intellectual content, a Shakespearian emotional range: a sardonic and stoical view of the human condition. There are paintings — ‘The Triumph of Death’, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ — which descend from Hieronymus Bosch. There is also the marvellous ‘Fall of Icarus’. According to recent scholarship, the version we have is not a Bruegel, but a later copy. That is plausible; it looks later. Yet the composition is classic Bruegel. He would be drawn to any legend expressing the vanity of human wishes.

Bruegel’s world is Hobbesian. But Hobbes was a eupeptic pessimist. One suspects that this was also true of Bruegel. Endure, and enjoy. That applies most obviously in his winter scenes, and especially ‘Hunters in the Snow’, one of my favourite paintings. I do not think that any other artist is as good at making you feel cold. Cresting a hill, the returning hunters look miserable, as do their hounds, who might well be regretting their ancestor’s decision to accept that caveman’s hunk of rancid mammoth fat, thus sealing the great concordat between man and dog at the beginning of history and laying one of the foundations of civilisation. ‘In elevating mankind, Dog played a lesser role than God, but still a crucial one’: discuss.

As for the owners: they look frozen, chilled-to-the-marrow frozen, all-sensitive-parts-turned-to-icicles frozen. They appear to have caught one rabbit. Will that be enough to replace the calories which the cold has consumed? One’s eye is caught by the crows aloft, no doubt assessing the carrion potential of the groundlings below.

Yet they may be crowing too soon.