# Winter in Flemish painting

Flemish painting of the Golden Age is characterized by this type of snowy winter landscape. The Little Ice Age (1303 to 1850) was responsible for the emergence of this popular pictorial genre in the 17th century. Festive, winter painting depicts the social ideal of a peasant society that can no longer work the fields because of the ice, and is limited to killing pigs or gathering wood. The rest of the time is taken up with games, such as kolf, the equivalent of field hockey, and ice skating.

Pieter Bruegel the Younger appreciated this type of painting, for which he is remembered as one of the founding figures. As a symbol of the passage of time, winter plays a key role in his compositions. The representation of winter by Flemish painters is not a reliable vision of what 17th-century winters might have been like, but rather a winter topos, an idealization of winter in the service of the exaltation of painting techniques. Flemish painters recurrently depicted certain elements, such as stratus clouds (thick, low, fog-like clouds), snow-covered ground and icy waterways, omitting the negative aspect of these temperatures, which were often fatal to farmers and the land.

Take a look at the Brueghel's many depictions of winter:

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/PwVx23r1GuwWIg?hl=fr