Winter Landscape. The depiction of winter landscapes in Western art begins in the 15th century. Wintry and snowy landscapes are not seen in early European painting since most of the subjects were religious. Painters avoided landscapes in general for the same reason. The first depictions of snow began to occur in the 15th and 16th centuries. Paintings that feature snow as a theme are mostly landscapes, even if some of these works involve religious or even fantasy landscapes. Most of these winter landscapes in art history are plein-air depictions of winter scenes, using the quality of gray winter light to create the special winter atmosphere.Depiction of snow in Europe is essentially a northern European theme. Early European painters generally did not depict snow since most of their paintings were of religious subjects. The first artistic representations of snow came in the 15th and 16th centuries. Because frequent snowfall is a part of winter in northern European countries, depiction of snow in Europe began first in the northern European countries. Since the early 15th century, wintry scenes had been represented by artists in parts of large sculptural works on churches and even on a smaller scale in private devotional scripts such as the book of hours, a devotional collection of texts, prayers and psalms. These were often illuminated manuscripts such as Labours of the Months, a cycle of twelve paintings that illustrated the social life, the agricultural tasks, the weather, and the landscape for each month of the year. January and February were typically shown as snowy, as is February in the famous cycle of the Les Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry, illustrated 1412-1416. Some snowy scenes also appear in a set of early 14th-century frescoes created by Master Wenceslas for the Bishop's Palace at Trento, showing people throwing snowballs at each other, and in a detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Effects of Good Government in the City and Countryside.At that time, landscapes had not yet developed as a genre in art, which explains the scarcity of winter scenes in medieval painting. Snow was not depicted in art except where it had a context, such as in the winter months of calendars. During the Early Northern Renaissance and even more during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century, interest in landscape painting was increasing. The winter of 1564-1565 was said to be the longest and most severe for more than a hundred years-the beginning of a cold period in northern Europe now called the Little Ice Age. For the next 150 years, northern European winters were comparatively snowy and harsh. Crop failures, heavy snowfalls and advancing glaciers that consumed Alpine pastures and villages made the era a grim one for European peasants. It was early in the frigid winter of 1565 that Bruegel created The Hunters in the Snow, regarded as the first true winter landscape painting. It was part of a series that illustrated the months, something thematically similar to the traditional Flemish books of hours. In addition to the snowy Hunters, it included The Harvesters. The Hunters depicts village life in a snowbound Flemish setting, showing not only hunters with pikes trudging off with their dogs to seek game, but also villagers gathered around a fire, frozen ponds with skaters, and houses and churches in the distance-all against a fanciful backdrop of snow-covered mountains. The series was commissioned in 1565 by a wealthy patron in Antwerp, Niclaes Jonghelinck. The paintings by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder were on a larger scale than calendar paintings; they measured approximately three feet by five feet. Bruegel continued to depict snow in his paintings. He created the first nativity scene to include snow, Adoration of the Magi in a Winter Landscape, which is also the earliest known painting to actually depict falling snow. He also started a vogue for Netherlandish winter painting. The popularity of landscapes in the Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a now Protestant society, which preferred non-religious themes such as still life, genre painting, and landscape painting. The tradition of painting landscapes continued well into the 19th century and developed into the Romantic landscape. Between 1780 and 1820, following the initial vogue in the 16th century for Netherlandish winter landscapes, winter subjects again become popular. However, this time winter landscapes became popular in their own right, as the beginning of the Romantic movement created a new interest in the landscape.