Snowflakes have been falling from the sky for two billion years. Yet it wasn’t until the 15th and 16th centuries that these delicate ice crystals began to appear in European art, first in illuminated devotional books and later in the stunning paintings of Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Bruegel is the first major European artist to illustrate falling snow as well as the first to place the Holy Family in a winter landscape.
In Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, Bruegel depicts the Holy Family in a 16th-century Netherlandish village. On the far left, inside a ramshackle building, Mary and Joseph shield Baby Jesus from the biting cold.
While a few villagers wait patiently for a glimpse of the newborn, everyone else goes about their daily routines—collecting water, trimming willow branches, and sledding on the icy river. Could Bruegel be suggesting that miracles happen every day, but we fail to notice them?
Further off in the distance, armed men are gathering near a castle. Are they soldiers? Or perhaps hunters? When this painting was made, Spanish dominance over the Low Countries was creating so much resentment, it would lead to war within five years. What’s more, heavy snowfalls were causing crop failures. This was a bleak period for European peasants.
Despite this, the village appears warm and inviting—largely due to the artist’s depiction of snow. In one of the most convincing winter scenes ever painted, Bruegel uses golden highlights and blue shadows to depict a vast blanket of white.
Even the foreboding sky looks beautiful on this holy day.
When snow feels cold as ice
In the 1830s, renowned woodblock printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi made a series of paintings that collectively tell the story of Nichiren, one of the most influential and controversial monks in Buddhist history.
In Nichiren in Snow at Tsukahara, he portrays the monk as a social reformer in exile due to his polemical views on church and state. Nichiren is shown walking alone on Sado Island in the Sea of Japan, where it seems even natural forces have united against him.
An icy wind whips through his garments as he struggles to climb uphill, his bare legs ankle-deep in the snow. The artist uses a snowstorm to symbolize the cold reality facing Nichiren, condemned to live alone in an abandoned temple located in a graveyard.
To achieve this level of detail in a woodblock print, Kuniyoshi used more than a dozen ink colors in a stamping process that requires a separate block of hand-carved wood for each hue. Importantly, he cut dozens of notches into each block, allowing small circles of white paper to peek through the ink, resembling snowflakes.
This particular ukiyo-e print became so popular, admirers asked Kuniyoshi to convert his design into a tattoo.
A whiter shade of pale
While we think of snowflakes as white, they are actually translucent. These six-sided ice crystals act as tiny prisms, scattering the full spectrum of light to create the illusion of color.
The French Impressionists recognized this visual phenomenon. It’s one reason why their effets de neige (effects of snow) are some of the most beautiful and daring paintings created during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Winter scenes by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, and their fellow painters offer a masterclass in how to depict snow imbued with reflected light and color.
If the sky is blue, that blue must show up in the snow. In the morning, there is also green and yellow in the sky and these colors must also show up. In the evening, red and yellow are in the sky and must be reflected in the snow.
French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir
To paint Rooftop View (Snow Effect), Gustave Caillebotte studied the rooftops of Paris on a dreary winter afternoon. His unique composition captures snow as it blankets everything in the iconic cityscape—every mansard roof, dormer window, and chimney stack. The empty streets below only heighten the feeling of frozen silence.
In contrast, Winter; Woman with a Muff captures a fleeting moment of beauty. Impressionist Berthe Morisot presents a Parisian women bundled up in the colors of the season, ready to brave a winter snowstorm. As one art critic famously noted, “I have seen nothing more delicate in painting.”
On the other hand, some critics thought Morisot’s diaphanous brushwork went too far:
Mademoiselle Morisot has reduced painting to its simplest expression. Everything is hardly indicated, and everything is charming. But, honestly, she leaves too much to the imagination. It is time to put an end to this pursuit, unless one wishes to reduce painting to a dreamlike state.
Art critic Eugène VĂ©ron, “L’Art,” 1880
If this is a dream, please don’t wake me
Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky had an “aha” moment while watching Wagner’s opera Lohengrin in Moscow. It occurred to him that paintings could stir our emotions in much the same way music does.
Importantly, Kandinsky had a neurological condition called synesthesia, which can cause people to “hear” color. When he saw green, the most tranquil of all colors, he heard the soothing sounds of a violin. Violet suggested the deep notes of a bassoon and light blue the airy notes of a flute. Thus, he began painting as if he were orchestrating a symphony:
I had little thought for houses and trees. I drew colored lines and blobs on the canvas with my palette knife, making them sing just as powerfully as I knew how.
Wassily Kandinsky, “Kandinsky,” 2007
In Winter Landscape I, fairytale colors convey the magic of freshly falling snow at sunset. A slushy, lavender footpath lures the viewer home, just in time for dinner.
We view this painting as a landscape, although Kandinsky’s unnatural colors and unblended brushstrokes reduce its relationship to reality. Indeed, like Matisse, he is using color to express the idea that feelings are more significant than material things.
Silence, broken by the sound of a shovel
In 1945, Beijing-born artist Zao Wou-Ki moved to Paris, where he quickly fell in love with French Impressionism and European Expressionism. But it was the innovative work of Paul Klee that inspired him to merge Eastern and Western traditions and break from strict figuration.
This synthesis is on full display in Swirling Snow, where Zao combines Abstract Expressionism with calligraphic elements that “convey the Chinese spirit.” Splashes of blue, lavender, and orange channel the wild energy of a snowstorm, while vaguely figural black lines amplify the impression of movement.
Zao’s seemingly effortless brushwork delivers remarkable clarity. He creates a feeling of depth on a flat surface while boldly stepping away from the rules of perspective drawing.
As British art critic John Russell noted, Zao’s work “takes us to a place not yet defined but in abeyance, hesitant, hovering one last moment before plummeting into order.”
Silence, soon to be broken by the sound of a snowblower.