The Six Seasons

Two works by Emily Allchurch caught my eye at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: The Six Seasons – (Winter) after Breughel, and The Six Seasons – (Late Summer) after Breughel. I found the full series on her website:

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.