Studio
Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, woken by the studio
Pieter Brueghel the Younger, after 1565Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap

Alive

Painted after 1565. The river has frozen and the village is out on the ice. The thing to look at is on the right, where nobody is looking. A door is propped up on a stick. Someone has scattered food under it, and the birds have started to walk in. A rope runs from the stick to a house. When it is pulled, the door falls. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the first one in 1565. He added the trap at the end, over snow he had already finished. That panel is small, 37 cm by 56, and it hangs in Brussels. His son painted the same scene again and again, and so did the men in his workshop. 127 copies still exist. About 45 of them are thought to be the son's own work. No other picture by his father was copied so often.

look closer

An old door propped on a stick, bait underneath, birds walking in. The rope runs off to a house out of frame.

An old door propped on a stick, bait underneath, birds walking in. The rope runs off to a house out of frame.