In 1565, Bruegel the Elder was commissioned by the Antwerp merchant Nicolas Jongelinck to paint the ‘Seasons’, a series of six paintings following a calendar year in Northern Europe, with each painting representing two months of the year.
The paintings Bruegel created were an exploration of man’s relationship and interactions with nature. The best known of the series, ‘Hunters in the Snow’, records the harshest winter in a period of intense climate change known as the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300-1850). Despite the hardship resulting from the bitterly cold conditions and food shortages, the painting illustrates man’s ability to endure and find joy, evident in the games being played on the frozen rivers and ponds. It celebrates man’s relationship with nature, no matter how punishing.
Allchurch’s new collection of work, ‘The Six Seasons’ re-imagines Bruegel’s paintings, using assemblages of thousands of contemporary photographs taken in the English landscape. By recreating Bruegel’s paintings with images from today, Emily looks at the central theme of the ‘Seasons’ – man’s relationship to nature and the land – and asks what has changed in the intervening centuries, and what has stayed them same.
Five of Allchurch’s images are based on the surviving paintings that are now distributed across three countries and two continents: The Hunters in the Snow, The Gloomy Day, and The Return of the Herd at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; The Harvest at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and The Haymaking at Lobkowicz Palace, Prague Castle. The sixth painting, however, has long been lost.
In ‘The Six Seasons’, Allchurch re-imagines the missing painting as ‘The Six Seasons – Late Spring (after Bruegel), “reuniting” it with its companion pieces.
In her upcoming Oct 2024 exhibition launch at James Freeman Gallery, London N1, all six images will be hung together in one space, a contemporary echo of how Bruegel’s group was intended to hang together in that small dining room in Antwerp, almost 460 years ago.
“As we live through our own period of climate change I wanted to update the series from a contemporary perspective, reflecting on the fragility of nature and the seasons as we have known them, and how our interventions with landscape, mostly through leisure and tourism, are managed and mediated.
With its focus on the everyday and ordinary, and a subtle underlying commentary on how we connect with nature and the landscape today, I hope ‘The Six Seasons’ series successfully captures our present moment in time.”
Emily Allchurch, 2024
The Six Seasons – Description of Works.pdf (10.8Mb) >
Installation Views: “The Six Seasons” – solo exhibition at James Freeman Gallery – Oct 2024 >