What to do with the winter scene in times of climate change?

‘O! Severe Winter full of sorrow / Will your anger plague us any longer?” wrote Titia Brongersma in 1686. That winter was lamented is not surprising for those who know that hands, noses and genitals froze off at that time. They are the reverse of the typical Dutch winter scenes that we know from famous paintings such as Ice cream entertainment‘, a painting by Hendrick Avercamp, and Winter landscape with skaters and birdsong‘ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The period of Bruegel’s ice scene (his winter landscape is from circa 1564-1565) is already known as a ‘little ice age’, but half a century later at Avercamp it is so cold in the winters (ca. 1615-1620) that the story goes that the ice became three inches thick in one night. Taking a horse-drawn sleigh across the Wadden Sea was not exceptional. At that time the world was more than one and a half degrees colder than it is today. That made a big difference that was especially noticeable in winter.

However, both paintings show that winter was preferred to be experienced together. There was life on the ice, there was skating, you see a kind of ice hockey, sledding, something that looks like curling with Bruegel, but also just mother and child, walking hand in hand on the ice. At Avercamp we see a woman sitting on a boat that has frozen and now serves as a bench, elsewhere a woman is doing laundry in a hole. The hut in the middle is called a ‘vogelknip’: even the smallest bird was a feast.

The ice fun also included a certain moral: man is walking on thin ice, we are all unstable, but avoid pride.

By Bruegel

In the year 1564, in which Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569) painted his winter landscape, all of Western Europe was struck by an extreme cold wave. From mid-December, as can be read in the impressive overview A thousand years of weather, wind and water in the Low Countries by J. Buisman, shipping came to a standstill, and that lasted until mid-March 1565. The winter 1564-65 was the coldest winter since 1511. From December 25, horse and carts travel across the Scheldt.

Winter landscape with skaters and birdsongPieter Bruegel, ca. 1564-1565

Click on the points for an explanation of the details

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

How bad that winter was is beautifully described in a poem by the Flemish Daniël Van Oesbroeck. He wrote in 1564: “The cauwe was so great early and late that the wine froze in the glasses.” And a little further on: “Oh, there are many poor people who died / because some of them broke within their houses / because they could acquire four warm (fire) / carriages, sofas, chairs, baskets and baskets / and others broke down to build their houses. ”

The theologian Johannes Molanus – like Van Oesbroeck quoted by Buisman – notes: “The cold was so penetrating that the snot also froze in the nostrils and that food placed near the hearth could hardly be protected from frost. Yes, here and there, human ears, feet and hands fell off and the genitals fell off. (…) Not only people and livestock died every day, but birds also fell stiff with cold.”

At Avercamp

Winter landscape painting became a popular genre during this cold time, and Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634) became one of the most famous winter landscape painters. It is not known exactly when he made his painting, but it was probably somewhere between 1615 and 1620. In those years the winters were somewhat milder, but there were plenty of times when it was extremely cold.

This was also the experience of the poet Bredero, who was surprised by a hole in the ice in 1618 when he returned from the funeral of a friend. He has to cancel an appointment with his girlfriend Magdalena Stockmans because he caught a cold after being up to “his loins” in ice, and also had to deal with a treacherously cold northwest wind.

Ice cream entertainment Hendrick Avercamp, ca. 1615-1620

Click on the points for an explanation of the details

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Whether this has definitively stood in the way of love cannot be said, but Stockmans marries his rival, a man who Bredero called ‘the brown Brabander’. The poet, then 33 years old, ultimately did not survive the physical and mental suffering and died on August 23 of that year.

AI over winter

More than four hundred years later, the Little Ice Age is not only long over, we are all working towards the opposite: in January and February of this year it was about two degrees warmer than average. Now suppose that art history had stood still, how would 21st century Avercamps or Bruegels portray the situation now? This was the question we tried to answer with the help of AI expert Joost Smits using the AI ​​image generator DALL-E.

It is still a pleasant atmosphere in the contemporary villages. It is busy on the street, but the sled and skate have disappeared, and it is raining: the umbrella dominates the street scene. The traditional mills have been replaced by large windmills that rise high above the roofs. Birds can be seen in the sky, but they could also be airplanes. The seventeenth-century buildings are still standing, but the ban on solar panels on monuments has disappeared, which gives them a completely different look.

Ice cream entertainment by Hendrick Avercamp and the AI ​​editing by Joost Smits

In the other ‘new’ winter scene it still wants to snow a bit, but there is no ice fun here either. There is nothing wintery to experience on waterways anymore, there are cars driving around, slowly it seems, because they mingle with the walking public just as easily as the boats at Avercamp, even though they were still frozen in the ice. Avercamp’s bird house has become a tree house in which children play. The sunlight is low, but from behind the windows you can see electric light everywhere, thanks, no doubt, to the solar panels.

Unlike Bruegel and Avercamp, we have passed beyond vacillation and morality has died out. And that pride? It will still kill us, but universally instead of individually.

Winter landscape with skaters and birdsong by Pieter Bruegel and the AI ​​adaptation by Joost Smits

To share





Email the editor