“Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Breugel the Elder (1565). It’s pretty appropriate for today.
If you look closely the hunters and their motley assortment of hounds managed to bag a fox.
I initially thought it was a hare, but if you look closely, it has a long fox’s tail.
And the painting is here in the Vienna Museum of Art History……I live in Vienna.
It is a fox indeed.
Magnificent painting, I went to the source and enlarged it – the detail is unbelievable! This was no doodling, this was work.
Yet, I who can’t even draw a straight line well, think the artist must have been most excellent at painting goats and sheep as well, perhaps due to using them as models much of the time. The ears on the dogs seem to hint at a long practice of painting heads of goats in detail.
But the exactness of the rest of the painting, the tiny well painted faces, the games on the ice, show such minute care, that it seems beyond human ability.
In contrast, some of the larger spaces, like the dog’s ears, seem a little bit hurried over or off kilter. The ice under the arches looks like frosty doors. To the left of them, a bit more in the foreground, is a white blob, which took me awhile to figure out to be another snowclad roof.
I like that, it let’s me believe that I can see the artist ‘s personality in the painting, that it is not just a mechanical photograph.
The painting reminds me of a short conversation with a friend’s mother. Her house was always unkempt, yet one day she was so upset that someone had said something about the lack of order in her home. She said that her house was tidy! Even a child could see tat this just was not true. Yet the mother insisted that her house was clean and tidy.
She insisted on proving it by showing off her cupboards, drawers, and closets, where everything was put away just exactly right. The part of the house which could not be put away, didn’t count. The details were important to her, not the bigger parts.
The tree twigs are perfect! How could anyone have the self control to sit and do each one of them? Makes my head hurt just to imagine doing that much detail.
In 1948 American poet John Berryman wrote “Winter Landscape”, a poem about the above photo. Inspiring photo for those of us who use small dogs with coursing dogs.