Snowmageddon has hit the US East Coast: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts have declared states of emergency, and over 28 million people are expecting to face blizzard conditions in the next few hours. A staggering 50 million will wake up to a foot of snow. To cheer up all those held up at home waiting for the storm to pass, artnet News has gathered some of art history’s best snow scenes.
One of the very first winter landscapes was the Limbourg Brothers’s Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Folio 2, verso February, (1412–16), commissioned by the French aristocrat Duc du Berry for a prayer book. It depicts a typically rural winter scene in which a group of people are huddled around a fire indoors whilst a man chops fresh firewood outside.
But, according to Art in Society, Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) is regarded as the first “proper” winter landscape, free of any religious connotations. The snowy outdoor scene shows two hunters returning to town. The use of cold colors, and the artist’s depiction of the warmly clad men, deep snow, barren trees, and frozen lake in the background has a distinctly timeless quality .
Bruegel’s painting paved the way for the other artists in our list, from Wassily Kandinsky to Edvard Munch, Camille Pissarro to Vincent van Gogh. Snow can be a glorious thing indeed.