Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap

Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap is a small oil painting on oak panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, signed and dated 1565 at the lower right, in the Oldmasters Museum of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (inv. 8724). It measures 37 by 55.5 cm.

The panel belongs to a short run of five snow scenes in which Bruegel helped to establish winter landscape as a genre in Western painting, from the Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, now dated 1563, to The Hunters in the Snow of the same year, 1565. The group is often linked to the sharp cooling of northern European winters, and above all to the severe winter of 1564–65. The village has been identified as Sint-Anna-Pede near Brussels, whose church also appears in The Blind Leading the Blind of 1568.

Skaters, curlers and children crowd a frozen river below a row of snow-covered houses, while the near bank on the right belongs to the birds. There an old door is propped on a stick over scattered bait, with a rope running to one of the houses, ready to drop on the feeding birds. Technical study showed that the bird trap is absent from the sketchy underdrawing and was painted over the snowy ground at a late stage; much of the rest was painted quickly, wet-in-wet. Many moral or allegorical readings of the trap have been proposed, but none has won wide acceptance.

No other Bruegel painting was copied as often. In 2000 Klaus Ertz documented 127 copies, many by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, whose dated versions run from 1601 to 1626; one in Vienna was long taken for the original. Partly for this reason the Brussels panel's status was questioned for decades after it was published in the 1920s, until a re-examination in 2012 supported it. It came to the museum in 1973 as a bequest from Mrs Delporte-Livrauw and Dr Franz Delporte.