Paisagem de inverno com armadilha para pássaros

The winter Bruegel painted here was a real one. The 1560s brought some of the coldest years of what we now call the Little Ice Age, and the winter of 1564 into 1565, just before he made this, was one of the harshest of the century in the Low Countries. So the frozen river, the villagers skating and sliding, the boats locked in the ice, all came from something people had just lived through. Look to the right and you find the bird trap the title names, a heavy door propped on a stick over scattered seed, ready to drop. Bruegel sets that small snare against the skaters on the thin ice, both of them a step from danger without knowing it. It became his most copied composition, with around 140 old versions known, many by his son.