Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (from Web Gallery of Art).
- Paintings by the Dutch and English masters during the Little Ice Age (c. 1300-1850) commonly show people skating on canals, lakes, and rivers that regularly froze during the 14th through 19th centuries but do not freeze today.
- Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (shown above) is an example of one such painting. It depicts people skating on a canal in a Brabant village in the Netherlands.
- This particular scene may be alluding to the winter of 1564-65, which, according to journals and chronicles from the time, was particularly severe.
How is this related to climate?
- The freezing of canals, lakes and rivers, many of which do not freeze today, that is depicted in these paintings was due to a drop in average global temperatures associated with the Little Ice Age.
References and additional resources
- Prothero, D. R. and Dott, R. H. Evolution of the Earth (8th ed). New York, McGraw-Hill Education, 2010.
- “Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder.” Web Gallery of Art. (n.d.). https://www.wga.hu/html_m/b/bruegel/pieter_e/01/13winter.html.