Hunters in the Snow

Hunters in the Snow (Winter), also known as The Return of the Hunters, is an oil painting on oak panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, signed and dated 1565; it hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

It belongs to a series of paintings of the times of the year that Bruegel made for the Antwerp collector Nicolaes Jongelinck. The series follows the medieval tradition of the Labours of the Months, though here nature dominates and people are small or pushed to the margins. Five panels survive: three in Vienna, The Hay Harvest in Prague and The Harvesters in New York. In 1594 the city of Antwerp gave the set to Archduke Ernst, governor of the Netherlands; it later passed to Emperor Rudolf II and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. The prevailing view is that this panel represents December and January and closes the cycle.

Three hunters trudge back to the village with a tired pack of dogs; the only catch is a single fox slung on a spear. At the left, villagers outside an inn feed a fire to singe a pig, and the inn's sign, showing Saint Eustace, patron of hunters, hangs askew. Below, a watermill's wheel is frozen and figures skate and play kolf and curling-like games on the ice, while crows sit in the bare trees and a magpie flies overhead. Jagged mountains, foreign to the Low Countries, rise at the right; German Wikipedia links them to Bruegel's journey across the Alps on his return from Italy.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum calls it the first and most prominent winter landscape of European painting, admired less for its details than for its overall effect of lasting cold. It appears in Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris (1972) and in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011), and is the subject of an ekphrastic poem by William Carlos Williams. It measures 116.5 × 162 cm.