Pieter Brueghel, o Velho

Bruegel earned the nickname Peasant Bruegel for the weddings, dances and harvests full of ordinary country people that made him famous, and it left the impression that he was a peasant himself. He was not. He was an educated townsman, a guild master in Antwerp, and a friend of humanist scholars, among them the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius and the printer Christophe Plantin.

In 1565 a wealthy Antwerp merchant commissioned a set of large panels showing the labours of the year, season by season. Hunters in the Snow is the winter one: three hunters trudge home through deep snow with a single fox and a string of lean dogs, past frozen ponds where tiny figures skate under a heavy grey sky. The 1560s fell in a run of unusually harsh European winters that later historians named a little ice age, and that cold sits right on the surface of the painting.

Bruegel moved from Antwerp to Brussels around the time he married in 1563, and he died there in 1569, young enough that his two sons, both of whom became painters, were small children who barely knew him.