Those of us in the northern hemisphere are just sliding into the autumn/fall, as those in the southern are entering Spring. This weekend I celebrate the seasons with the help of an array of some of the finest painters of their time. This article shows sets up to that painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Tomorrow I conclude from the most famous set of all, completed by Nicolas Poussin shortly before his death in 1665, up to the early twentieth century. In each case, I show the seasons in chronological order, starting with Spring, and ending with winter.

The earliest paintings in modern Europe depicting seasons were calendar miniatures in Books of Hours like those of the Limbourg Brothers, such as the famous Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, from about 1411-1416.

One of the early artists who transferred the theme to full-size easel paintings was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who made several of his marvellous anthropomorphic portraits in sets of four. Less well-known, but more ambitious, is his Four Seasons in One Head from about 1590. He combines different passages to represent the seasons in turn. Spring is in the flowers on the body, summer in the sheaves of ripe corn, autumn in the fruits decorating the hair, and winter in the leafless face and branches.

Although best known for these anthropomorphic paintings, Arcimboldo was by no means their only exponent. At about the same time, Joos de Momper painted anthropomorphic landscapes, in which figures appear from crafted landforms. These come together in an undated series of four allegories of the seasons.

The most conventional platform for depicting the seasons was, inevitably, in landscape paintings. In another series, de Momper painted one of the finest landscape sets between about 1612-15. Each of these is carefully composed with a checklist of different details: trees and their foliage, domestic animals, birds both species and activity, human dress and activity, weather, sky, and so on. This provides much common ground with traditional East Asian paintings of the seasons, as shown in tomorrow’s article.

The Bruegels had also been working for many years on their series showing the seasons. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525-1569) had been commissioned to produce designs for prints in the mid 1560s, but after his early death the incomplete project was taken over by Hans Bol (1534-1593) and completed as prints in 1570. Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638) used those as the basis for one of his standard series of paintings, of which two complete sets are known to survive. The images below are of the set in the National Museum of Art of Romania, in Bucharest.

In Spring, gardeners are planting out a formal Italianate flower-garden, a sight that was probably inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s visit to Italy. It has been suggested that this composition is even more ingenious, in showing March in the foreground, April behind, and May at the furthest end of the garden.

Summer shows the conventional country sight of the wheat harvest, as more fully developed in other paintings by the Brueghels, and one of the most familiar with its golden stooks and bustling activity.

The composition used for Autumn is taken from Bol’s print, although here the number of figures has been reduced to simplify and clarify. The villagers are busy slaughtering and preparing animals, as stooks of corn are laid up in lofts.

Winter draws on several earlier paintings showing skating on ice, and is influenced by those and Bol’s composition used in his 1570 series of prints.