Adoration of the Magi in a Winter Landscape

Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1563

Adoration of the Magi in a Winter Landscape - Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Snow falls over a Flemish village, a child slides toward a hole in the ice, and the three kings almost vanish in a corner. Bruegel hid the holiest scene of Christmas inside an ordinary winter day.

The story behind the painting

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted this small oil on oak panel, his second version of the Adoration of the Magi, and set the visit of the three kings to the infant Jesus in a contemporary Netherlandish village. With two Italian exceptions, it is thought to be the first painting in the West to show snow actually falling, the flakes added as white dots across the whole scene once the picture was otherwise finished. The date in Roman numerals at the lower left is hard to read. It was long read as 1567, but technical study before the 2019 Vienna exhibition led to 1563, which would make it Bruegel's earliest snow scene rather than perhaps his last.

What to look for

At 35 by 55 cm the panel is far smaller than Bruegel's other crowded village scenes. Look to the bottom left: the stable with the Holy Family can just be made out in the gloom. Everyone is wrapped up against the cold, so visitors, villagers and perhaps soldiers are hard to tell apart. On the frozen water across the road, two men on a bridge work with a log beside a hole cut for water, and two more carry buckets up the steps. A toddler pushes himself across the ice on a makeshift sledge, heading for the hole, while his mother on the bank above springs into action. To the right a ruined Romanesque palace is propped up by a beam, and the sky is a featureless veil of cloud.

Meaning and intent

Moving the main event away from the centre is typical of Bruegel, as in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and The Census at Bethlehem. Here the diagonal crowd tends to lead the eye away from the stable. The heavy wrapping stresses the anonymity of everyone present, absorbed into the divine scheme. The holy story happens, but daily life goes on: water must be fetched, children play, and weather presses on all alike. The earlier dating also places the work before the hard winter of 1564 to 1565 and the iconoclasm of 1566, events some historians had linked to it.

Legacy

The picture, or a drawing of it, was clearly available in the Brueghel family workshop. The RKD records 36 early copies, about 25 by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and most show snow on the ground but not falling. The original is first recorded in 1696 in the collection of the banker Everhard Jabach in Paris. By the early 20th century it belonged to Count Johann Moritz Saurma, then passed through the dealer Paul Cassirer to Oskar Reinhart in 1930. It now hangs in the Oskar Reinhart Collection Am Romerholz in Winterthur, and was shown in Vienna in 2018 to 2019 for the 450th anniversary of Bruegel's death.

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About the artist

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569)

woman · religious art · Mary · boy · Christ Child · adoration of the Magi · adoration · Biblical Magi

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