Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (after Pieter Bruegel the Elder) - Pieter Brueghel the Younger (c. 1601–1626)

Pieter Bruegel

Oil on panel

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

This painting is a copy after the celebrated 1565 panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, titled Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, depicting a Flemish village in deep winter. Skaters glide across a frozen river while, in the right foreground, birds peck at bait beneath a propped wooden door poised to trap them — an allegorical motif widely interpreted as a warning against human heedlessness and temptation. The original composition, now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, was the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the preeminent Flemish Renaissance painter renowned for his panoramic landscapes and scenes of peasant life set amid the harsh winters of the Little Ice Age. Pieter Brueghel the Younger — who appended the 'h' to his surname — systematically reproduced his father's most successful compositions, and this winter scene became the most copied work in the entire Bruegel canon, with over 127 documented versions.