Winter Landscape Paintings by Dutch and English Masters

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

How to cite this page

Winter Landscape Paintings by Dutch and English Masters. (2021, June 30). Climate in Global Cultures and Histories: Promoting Climate Literacy Across Disciplines. Retrieved Month Date, Year, from https://www.science.smith.edu/climatelit/winter-landscape-paintings-by-dutch-and-english-masters/.