Winter Landscape (January or February)

Collecting and carrying home brush and firewood was already a characteristic feature of winter in the Early Netherlands books of hours. Here we see this activity as part of everyday life in a Flemish village. The “impressionistic” effect of the snowflakes painted close together seems bold, and yet it had been seen before in a work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As in Bruegel’s cycle of the seasons, Winter was probably the final work in Valckenborch’s series.