Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap

Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, also known as The Bird Trap, is a panel painting in oils by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from 1565, now in the Oldmasters Museum in Brussels. It shows a village scene where people skate on a frozen river, while on the right among trees and bushes, birds gather around a bird trap. It is signed and dated at the lower right: "BRVEGEL / M.D.LXV’1". There are more early copies of this than any other painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, many by his much younger son Pieter Brueghel the Younger, or other members of the Brueghel family dynasty and workshop. The art historian Klaus Ertz documented 127 copies in his comprehensive monograph on the artist's son in 2000.

The painting comes from a brief period when Bruegel painted five snowy landscapes (see gallery below), thereby establishing a genre of winter landscapes in Western art. These are firstly the Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, now redated to 1563, becoming the earliest of the group. Unlike the others, this shows snow falling. The year of the Bird Trap, 1565, also produced The Hunters in the Snow, the most famous of the group, part of a series showing the months or seasons. The date of the Massacre of the Innocents is less certain, placed between 1565 and 1567, and The Census at Bethlehem is dated to 1566. The group have often been thought to have been influenced by a sharp decrease in winter temperatures in northern Europe, especially in the very hard winter of 1564/65. Bruegel died in 1569, aged about 44 or less.

The painting of the panel began with a "sketch-like underdrawing", which in particular did not include the bird-trap. The main execution is "characterized by a rather spontaneous painting process with numerous areas applied wet-in-wet". There are reddish tones which "enliven the landscape", but "appear inconsistent in colour and execution and have likely been reworked by a later hand". The village is said to be based on Sint-Anna-Pede near Brussels, whose church was also used in the background of Bruegel's The Blind Leading the Blind (1568, now Naples).