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Category: Little Ice Age

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Awe-inspiring snow

At times, the Great White North reaches down and touches us with its living whiteness and its freakish cold.

Winter Comes From The Arctic To The Temperate Zone, 1935, Lawren Harris, courtesy McMichael Collection of Canadian Art. He is describing exactly what we’re experiencing today, where arctic airmasses have flowed into the northern US.

We got more snow than expected; there’s something like 15” of it in my driveway. That’s nothing compared to the Newark Valley of New York; my friend Marjean trenched a path to her barn through 45” of new powder. Animals must be tended regardless of the weather.

Long before there were cell phones, I routinely painted outside in winter. One year, I committed to plein air painting six days a week regardless of weather. In western New York that can be wicked indeed. That year made me into a painter. It is also how I moved from being an amateur to a professional. I had so many paintings lying around, I was forced to sell them.

The Artist in Greenland, 1935, Rockwell Kent, courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art

Rockwell Kent first visited Greenland in 1929, saying the visit â€śhad filled me with a longing to spend a winter there, to see and experience the far north at its spectacular worst; to know the people and share their way of life.”  In 1931, Kent built himself a hut in in the tiny settlement of Illorsuit, a village north of the Arctic Circle. He wintered and painted there. As a socialist, Kent was enamored of Inuit society, considering their little village a kind of utopia.

Kent later said that his year in Illorsuit was the happiest and most productive time of his life. Among his other pursuits, he acquired a sled and team so that he could make even more remote painting and camping expeditions. In a witty aside, Kent painted himself painting an iceberg, above.

 The Sea of Ice, 1823–24, Caspar David Friedrich, courtesy Hamburger Kunsthalle. The only sign of human activity is the shipwreck.

As a German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich could be described as a utopianist of a different stripe. His goal was to portray that sublime moment when the contemplation of nature causes a reawakening of our spiritual self. (Friedrich was a city-dweller; otherwise he’d have felt differently.)

Friedrich set out a manifesto for painters that still rings true: “The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead.”

The only hint of human activity in The Sea of Ice, above, is the subtle, moralizing shipwreck. This is very different from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow, which is a parade of everything medieval man did in the wintertime.

The Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum

While the overwhelming sense is one of order and industry, the hunters and their dogs are exhausted, and they’ve bagged only one measly red fox. This painting was done during the Little Ice Age, when the threat of famine was real.

Lawren Harris was one of the driving forces behind the Canadian Group of Seven, and the most elastic of them. He went from impressionism to art nouveau realism to complete abstraction in two decades. His final break with realism occurred in the early 1930s, after he visited and painted in the Arctic.

Harris believed in the arctic as a living force: “We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, its call and answer, its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity into the growing race of America.” His painting at top is a narration of what happens when that power spills into the northern US and Canada.

Four different painters from different places and times, but they’re all telling stories of winter in very inventive ways. Could we do half as well?

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Cause du Jour?

Be careful about reading your own times and beliefs into paintings.
Massacre of the Innocents, 1565-67, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, courtesy British Royal Collection
It has been, as my friend Poppy Balser from Nova Scotia noted yesterday, an unsatisfying season for winter painting along the North Atlantic. Squalls have resolved into freezing rain. That makes for bad optics and treacherous footing.
Monday, my pal Ed Buonvecchio and I had a date to paint. It stormed, so we rescheduled for Thursday. He texted me from Augusta in the morning. “0° here!” By 11 AM, it had reached a meager 16° F. with a light, biting wind. It’s one thing to be outside in those temperatures; it’s another to stand for hours in front of an easel. We’ll try again next week.
Artsy recently ran an essay about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s winter landscapes and their relationship to the Little Ice Age, the intense cooling cycle of the earth that occurred between roughly 1300 and 1850. It’s interesting but hyperbolic reading, intent on making a statement about global warming.
Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum
About Hunters in the Snow, Jonathan McAloon writes, “three men and their dogs—soggy, exhausted, and hunched against the cold—trudge home from a hunting expedition,” returning with only “a single small fox.” Yes, dogs and men are tired—as anyone is after hiking through deep snow—but there’s no reason to think they’re wet, and they certainly aren’t malnourished or dressed in rags.
There was much suffering during the Little Ice Age, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317, which took out millions of people worldwide. Seawater froze as far south as the Bosporus. The Swedes could march across frozen ocean straits to attack and defeat Denmark. Grains and vines failed in the northern reaches, and Norse settlements in the New World withered away.
Winter Landscape with (Skaters and) a Bird Trap, 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
But those settlements were themselves the result of another climatic fluctuation. The Little Ice Age followed on the heels of the Medieval Warm Period. The North Atlantic became so temperate that the Vikings sailed as far west as far as L’Anse aux Meadows, and probably beyond. Warmth in some regions of North America exceeded temperatures of the current (1990–2010) period. I’m not telling you this to ignite yet another tedious argument about global warming, but to set the context of Bruegel’s painting.
For three hundred years, Europe was warmer than normal, and then for 550 years, it was colder than normal. These weather shifts brought displacement, disease and drought. Naturally, people tried to explain them, but they also learned to exploit them.
The period in which Bruegel painted was bitterly cold, but it was also the third century of the Little Ice Age. To him, intensely cold winters were the norm. The people in Bruegel’s village are simply living through winter, much as we do today.
The Census at Bethlehem, 1566, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
It’s important to link great paintings with their historical context; it teaches history, and it makes us understand the painter. But focusing on an imaginary struggle between the terribleness of winter and its harsh beauty deflects from Bruegel’s own focus. He was, of course, the first painter of snow, but he was also a faithful scribe of the Protestant Reformation.
Bruegel dealt with a problem which still bedevils us: how can the artist tell an ancient, unvarying story in a new language? His solution was to quote traditional Bible stories in the context of his own experience. This was not just the landscape, dress and activities of his times. It was the Reformation idea of priesthood of all believers, represented by the masses of people who inhabit his paintings. That marks him as a northerner as surely as the snow does.
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I do love me a good conspiracy theory

January, from the fresco cycle Cycle of the Months by the Bohemian master Venceslao, c. 1400, in Trento.
A Facebook friend posted a photo of a snowball he’d attempted to melt with a lighter. Turns out he was responding to a conspiracy theory that the stuff that fell over Atlanta wasn’t real snow. (It’s pretty exhaustively debunked here.)
Trying to burn snow must be a southern thing. I’ve lived in snow country all my life, and it’s never occurred to me to take a lighter to the stuff. Here in the north, we know snow mainly goes away by sublimationor compression.
Winter, from the fresco cycle Allegories of good and bad government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338 – 1340, in Sienna, Italy.
Some Atlantans said the snow didn’t look “normal.” Up here in Rochester, we see too many kinds of solid precipitation to expect any consistency in snow texture: hoarfrost, graupel, needles, rime, powder, sleet, slush, and more.
Still, it isn’t typical for storm after storm to batter the mid-Atlantic region while holding the northern interior in deep freeze. A schoolteacher in Wilmington, DE tells me her students have had ten snow days so far this year.
The Frozen Thames, 1677, Abraham Hondius
The Little Ice Age was a period of cooling from about 1350 to 1850 (or, depending on whom you’re asking, from the fifteenth to the 19th century). The population of Iceland fell by half. The Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished.
The Thames froze so solidly that frost fairs were regularly held on its ice from 1607 to 1814. The Golden Horn and southern Bosporus froze. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, and “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” (1816) caused summertime frosts all over the northern hemisphere and resulted in widespread famine and death.
This century’s normal might just be last century’s freak snowstorm. But normal shouldn’t include arresting people for throwing snowballs. Art history tells us we’ve been doing that for as long as there’s been snow.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!