Tales of Winter: The Art of Snow and Ice

For most of human history, winter has been our most bitter adversary.

Our ancestors faced brutal months of terrible cold,

and the constant anxiety that food and fuel would last until the thaw.

This heroic battle of endurance was ignored by artists,

who saw nothing to paint in this harshest of seasons.

But once we were able to protect ourselves from the worst the weather

could do, we began to look at winter in a new way, to appreciate

its transient beauty, its seasonal variety and its terrible power.

Winter began to inspire images that are now amongst the most

popular paintings of all time.

The struggle for survival in a Flemish village,

a temporary terra firma on the frozen Thames,

the most remarkable out-flanking manoeuvre in the history of war.

The more we understood the power of winter, the more we used art to

explore our fascination with its effect on our lives.

As our confidence grew, we developed a rational disregard for the cold

and learnt to love the things that had previously scared us.

But when winter occasionally reasserts its authority,

we can still experience the terror our forebears knew.

Across Northern Europe, the winter of 1564

was the coldest of the century.

Crops failed, and towns and cities were plagued with famine and riots.

A deep and prolonged frost left many dying from starvation

and hypothermia.

This terrible period of cold was the first great

winter of the Little Ice Age.

By the time we get into the 16th century,

there set in what has become known as the Little Ice Age.

It's a very traumatic period for an agricultural society,

and it's not until the 1800s that we start to warm up again.

The winters were terrible, this winter of 1564-5

saw the largest snowfalls that had been experienced in a generation.

Nowhere were the effects of this vicious winter more keenly felt than

in the Netherlands, where political turmoil and religious strife,

caused by the Spanish occupation, added to the misery.

But another revolution was taking place that winter,

in the studio of a Flemish painter in Brussels.

Pieter Bruegel was painting the first snowscape in art,

Hunters In The Snow.

Hunters In The Snow is one of the most original paintings of all time.

It's an incredible, almost a seismic shift, in the world of art.

Just forgetting about the snow for a moment, it's actually one of the

first great landscapes. Bruegel has this trick of conveying immense

amounts of territory and expressing the world itself,

a sense of being on a planet, "This is what Earth is like in winter."

CHORAL SINGING

This picture, you know, it's one of the most famous landscape paintings

in the world. I've asked myself, as an artist, why it's so iconic.

You know, why is it sort of seared itself into the public imagination?

We look at the hunters and their sort of slumped poses,

and the way the dogs' heads are all kind of drooping down towards the

snow. You know, we immediately get feelings of abjection,

you're taken into that late afternoon, you know...

For me, it's like,

"Oh, God there's school tomorrow," it's an awfully depressing thing.

But then in the background it's light and you're like,

"Oh, the people are having fun, it's nice, they're all skating

"on the ice." It's not a kind of uniformly pessimistic painting.

Bruegel was one of the few Northern European painters who had

travelled to Italy at this time.

But it wasn't the great works of the Renaissance that influenced his

pictures, it was the snowy landscape he had crossed on his journey.

It's a made-up landscape. I mean, here we have the architecture

and the people of Flanders juxtaposed with the Alps,

you know, it doesn't exist this scene. The Alps were like

the moon to people who lived in the low countries in this period.

In the Renaissance, nobody thought of painting a winter's day.

The sky should be blue, the atmosphere should be warm,

that was what was beautiful,

so winter was really a new idea in art,

snow is beautiful, as well.

It seems obvious to us now because it has been depicted in art for

so long, but it was something that had to be invented,

discovered, thought about.

He's used the snow totally in the way that an art gallery

works against the back of a painting,

it's a stark nothingness against which, life moves.

And so that's why it works, there's no different tones of snow,

it's all crisp, white, there's no melting going on here,

this is your perfect fantasy of a snowy day.

And there is an element of truth about that. If you're

out in the landscape in the snow, it always has a sort of a fluorescent

glow to it that kind of comes up from the ground, and it bleaches out

all the shadows like a slightly overexposed photograph.

I mean there are the footprints of the hunters but, yeah,

it's a pretty pristine scene, it is fairyland.

Bruegel was one of the first painters whose work had

overtly social and political messages,

and this has made his pictures easily adaptable for parody.

Hunters In The Snow remains immensely popular

with political cartoonists.

Most people know the title of the painting so they know what

the context is that you're putting your political figures in.

And so I subvert it, really, and it has to have a theme,

if you like, and the one I did for The Spectator at Christmas

last year was based on the Eurozone, and how that was collapsing.

It's quite a depressing painting in a strange way,

the colours are very muted and green, green-grey.

And one of the great joys of parodying it

is the fact that snow is obviously white, and what you're leaving is

the whiteness of the paper, and that's terrific.

I'll show you, basically, how it's done.

I have several trees.

I think there are four or five trees in the painting.

Trees were the nicest thing to draw, actually, in a strange way.

But where the trees end you've got this lovely absence of anything,

which is what the snow is and just by leaving areas completely white

and empty, you're creating something

that's physically there, and you're making a picture out of it.

He was just good at making it look bloody cold, really.

Hunters In The Snow was an immediate hit for Bruegel.

He had connected with something elemental about the experience

of winter that we can still find in the picture today.

The picture actually captures a very primal scene, one that is,

in some way, hard-wired into our perception of the seasonal, maybe

that's why it keys in so strongly to those of us who experience a winter.

To this day, I cannot come over the snowy brow of a hill without

thinking of that image, it's so intrinsic to the way that I perceive

the juxtaposition between the cold outdoors and the warm inside.

These elements seem to me

to speak of a deep, atavistic human need for security and shelter, and

also a kind of delight to the eye in wandering between the evocations of

cold and winter in the foreground, and then, although of course it's

very snowy in the mid-ground, there is the suggestion everywhere that

there will be warmth down there, around the churchyard

and around the hamlet and in the village.

You know, even if we're with the hunters in the snow for a minute,

there's a kind of Potterton boiler just down here.

We have to ask why does the winter landscape gradually become

a thing we can appreciate as beautiful,

a thing that we can enjoy?

And, of course, we can enjoy winter landscapes today

because we can go back indoors and put the central heating on,

so it's rather fascinating to look back

and wonder at what points people have felt comfortable enough,

have had a good enough quality of life, enough food and firewood,

to be able to go outside into the cold and enjoy it.

The position that the viewer occupies is sort of slightly up

and behind the hunters.

You're actually in the kind of position you're in nowadays

in computer gaming when you pull back behind the head of an avatar.

We're in a highly cinematic position to see

the development of where the hunters are going to go,

and ineluctably, you want to go with the hunters, quite clearly

you're with the hunters, you want to seek that warmth.

The painting perfectly captured a universally-shared emotional

response to the experience of winter and showed that this darkest

time of year could make a powerful subject for art.

No-one seemed more pleased with this discovery than Bruegel himself.

There is evidence he may even have gone back

and added snow to paintings he had already finished.

Bruegel was also a pioneer in another sense.

Though there is no mention in the Bible of the time of year

when Jesus was born, the Christian church had established

the festival of the Nativity in the depths of winter.

Bruegel was the first person to take this literally

and set the events of the Christmas story in the snow,

giving them a dramatic new realism for people who were

experiencing exactly the conditions they saw in his paintings.

Perhaps his most shocking scene is The Massacre Of The Innocents.

He was working in a time when there was war in Flanders,

the Spanish army were engaged in quite severe reprisals.

He sets it not in ancient times but in his own time, in a village

in a sort of village high street and soldiers are coming down the street,

not Roman soldiers, they're Spanish soldiers, and it's terrifying.

It's a bit like nowadays they might set a Shakespeare play in Iraq.

This painting is very political in that it's

set in a very brutal biblical scene, I mean, probably

one of the most brutal, The Massacre Of The Innocents,

and he's using that to get at the Spanish invaders.

And here, Bruegel has painted it in the snow,

emphasising the time of year, but also the kind of abject

misery of the scene, the brutality and harshness

is made all the more stark against the white background of the snow.

In Bruegel's darkest paintings, the cruelty of winter is

an image of the harshness of mortal life.

It's merciless and it's an image of the unrelenting nature of winter,

and perhaps, by extension, of the unrelenting nature of war.

The cruel snow of Bruegel's Massacre

was a reflection of the time in which he lived.

The extreme cold of the Little Ice Age set in for the next 250 years,

but these bitter winters could sometimes provide

opportunities for amusement.

The change in the climate was keenly felt in Britain, too,

most famously causing the Thames to freeze over more regularly.

In 1621, as a consequence, the Lord Mayor licensed more butchers

to compensate for the scarcity of fish.

But the cold was not the only thing that contributed to this phenomenon.

The way that Old London Bridge was built was also a factor.

This view of the river in 1677 was painted by Abraham Hondius,

a Dutchman who had recently moved to London.

The Old London Bridge has lots and lots of little arches,

and these are big platforms in between, which block the flow

of the river. As you soon as you had a few blocks of ice in the river,

they'd nudge up against the piers, get trapped, and before you know it,

the whole area to either side of London Bridge was frozen solid.

Hondius has painted a confident Dutchman

on skates amongst the revellers.

He would have been very familiar with the frozen dykes

and canals of Holland,

but his Londoners are astonished by this alien environment.

The British are not used to this.

They're clambering and falling all over the place.

I think there's a way in which Hondius is having

a laugh at them. These are grown men turned into children again.

He gives chaps like this a kind of heroic position,

clambering on top of the ice floes here.

The river has frozen right from the bridge up to

Southwark Cathedral, which we can see over there,

which at that point dominated the skyline. But it's not a flat

surface at all, we've got these shards and splinters of ice.

The ferrymen were out of work

because they couldn't ply their trade across the water,

and so they, rather proprietarily, decided that they could

charge people to come down onto the ice, and then charge them again

to leave the ice the other side. So people queued up,

you can see them queuing to come down the steps here.

And chap here being told to reach in his pocket for coins, but it

was clearly worth paying your few coins

cos this was like some kind of theme park.

Hondius was very interested in the ways in which we imagined remote

and extreme places, and in this same year, 1677,

he painted what he called an arctic adventure, which actually looks very

similar to this in that he imagines this barren, ice-clad landscape.

So actually, he's making the centre of London

into a version of the Arctic.

Five years later, the arctic conditions returned.

In 1683, Britain suffered what may have been the coldest

winter of the Little Ice Age.

Once again, the Thames froze but on this occasion

the stillness of the air and the abrupt and dramatic drop

in temperature left the river with a surface as smooth as glass.

This virgin real estate was quickly colonised by entrepreneurial

Londoners, who created a winter wonderland of epic proportions

without paying a penny in rent for their premises.

We're just in the right spot here, we can see Temple straight ahead,

and this whole area became known as Temple Street,

because it was actually a street.

There were carriages crossing the river at this point.

There were people queueing, thousands of people,

flocking down onto the Thames to see this spectacle.

And hundreds of little booths

selling anything that you wanted on the ice.

There was an unwritten but widely respected feeling that this

temporary terra firma was somehow not part of the realm,

and not subject to the normal laws of the land.

The huge crowds attracted by the spectacle contained an uneasy mix

of all classes and the courtesies of society were not respected.

The King brought the Royal Family down

to see what all the fuss was about,

and left with this commemorative card recording his attendance.

I suppose the whole obsession with souvenirs was really

the sense that this absolutely transitory carnival would vanish

overnight, absolutely just vanish.

This city on ice - it really is a whole city, isn't it? -

would be gone in an instant.

The sense that the punters at the frost fair were

living on borrowed time subsided as the cold continued.

The river was frozen for ten weeks and this enforced holiday had

a devastating effect on the economy of the city.

The fact that the Thames froze over almost brought the city

to a standstill. And what do you do if you're forced to have

a holiday in England? You go and put on a carnival like this.

London's frost fairs demonstrated our ability to adapt to anything

the weather could throw at us, and have a good time in the process.

In the 19th century, the medieval London Bridge was rebuilt,

the river embanked and the ice never returned.

Londoners may have lost their opportunity for a midwinter party,

but we were not alone in challenging the elements by having

fun at the coldest time of the year.

The Catholic Church adroitly adapted ancient

seasonal rituals to its own ends, and before the austerity of Lent,

revellers had traditionally celebrated their last chance

for feasting and excess in the depths of winter with a carnival.

Nowhere was this tradition more indulgently embraced

than in the serene Republic of Venice.

This picture by Francesco Guardi, painted in the 1780s,

shows the celebrations on Giovedi Grasso, the Thursday before Lent.

Well, what's so fantastic about this picture is the atmosphere, really.

There's just this sort of extraordinary sense of a party

going on, which I really, really like.

I think there are lots of reasons for the carnival.

Fundamentally, it was about surviving this long, often really bitterly

cold winter. It's saying, "Winter's OK, winter can actually be fun."

And it's also about what Venice is,

it establishes a kind of great sense of collective solidarity

between all the different people who lived in Venice.

As a good Venetian, Guardi was reflecting this

solidarity in one crucial respect -

no-one in his painting looks ready to admit that it was too cold

to be behaving like this.

I don't know what time Easter was that year, but it's on the

Thursday, Giovedi Grasso,

and we're here on a Saturday,

two days later, in other words,

and all I can say is that it's seriously, freezing cold.

They all look quite relaxed,

and actually, the woman in the front, she's in a state

of slight undress. And of course, during the carnival in Venice that

would actually be quite difficult because what the picture doesn't

show us is how incredibly cold it can be in the winter in Venice.

The wind seems as though it's coming straight from Russia.

Francesco Guardi was a vedutista,

a Venetian view painter, a few years younger than Canaletto,

but he outlived his more famous rival by 25 years.

I prefer Guardi to Canaletto, because he really does

capture a sense of the movement and people of Venice.

In Canaletto, it's all about order,

and kind of Venice as it ought to be. Whereas in this painting, you've

got Venice as it really is and it's about people having a great time.

Guardi didn't know it but his picture showed the Doge

presiding over one of the last carnivals.

Four years after his death in 1797, Napoleon invaded Northern Italy

and brought an end to 1,000 years of the Republic.

The defeated Venetians stopped celebrating

the carnival at the same time.

The carnival was only revived in the 1970s,

really for commercial reasons, it was to bring tourists into the city

in February when normally it was a very low season.

There is still quite a lot about it that we can recognise.

There's a temporary structure over there in Piazza San Marco,

just like the temporary structure in Guardi's painting. And, also a whole

kind of atmosphere of dance and chaos and movement. You look at

the acrobats and it looks as though they're just about to fall over.

Although it is more commercial, you look around you

and people are really having fun, people are wearing masks,

people are really getting together and having a party.

The joy, the sheer joy, despite the freezing cold,

of being in Venice for an event like this, and I think in that

respect there are really a lot of similarities

between this painting and what we're seeing going on around us today.

Venice became a political bargaining chip in Napoleon's European wars,

and began a long period of decline.

But centuries of indolence

and extravagance had fitted her quite well for her new

role as a tourist curiosity.

Celebrating in winter didn't have to be such an ostentatious affair.

The city of Edinburgh could certainly match Venice

when it came to cold weather,

but the new rational sensibilities of the Scottish Enlightenment

led to more reserved ways to have fun in the cold.

Since the union with England in 1707, Scotland had steadily

increased in material prosperity, but it was in the fields

of science and the arts that a new confidence was most evident.

An English visitor famously claimed to be able to stand at the

cross in Edinburgh and take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand.

Had he done so, it's a safe bet that many of them would have

recently had their portrait painted by Sir Henry Raeburn.

In the 1790s, amusing themselves away from their books,

several of these men of learning established

the Edinburgh Figure Skating Club,

and met at The Sheep Heid Inn in Duddingston.

In the depths of winter, when the cold weather froze the nearby loch,

their leading light, the Reverend Robert Walker, took to the ice.

I think the Reverend Walker's right in front of us, because there,

going up the back of Arthur's Seat and then over to

Duddingston village, you've got the gentle hills moving down.

You can't see any of the houses of Duddingston village,

but I think he was being observed by Raeburn

roughly from where we are now.

The sky is that icy, watery, grey-blue of a Scottish winter

and I remember days like that, because as a child,

we went skating on the lochs all the time so it must have been colder.

Also, in Scotland, people were very stoic in the winter.

Winters were long and hard and dark.

Look, here he is, making the most of it.

If you look at the way Raeburn has done the cuts in the ice,

there's lots of gliding movement, there's lots of circular movements,

the Reverend Walker has been skating round for quite a while here.

I don't think Raeburn painted this oil painting

on the water, but he certainly took the sketches for it and he made sure

that he showed that the Reverend Walker had to work for his portrait

for quite a long time.

Presbyterianism, the strict Protestant doctrine

of the Church of Scotland, greatly approved of stoicism,

but in many other respects it was an institution seemingly at odds

with the rational and humanist ideals of the Enlightenment.

Presbyterianism is regarded as being incredibly dour, but actually,

this is not a pompous picture of a minister of the kirk saying,

"Look at me, I can skate so beautifully on the loch,"

"you know, I've been skating all my life." This is a minister who says,

"Let's have a bit of fun." Look, he looks like a dandy.

It's almost camp. He's got this beautiful frock-coat on,

and his lovely hat and this white tied shirt at the neck,

and he's got a slight smile on his face, which is what I love about it.

A lot of the clergy were involved with the literati

of the Scottish Enlightenment, and liked the conversation about science

and the natural world, geology, geography.

In Edinburgh, in this tiny area,

you could just feel their brains sizzling.

This is my favourite Scottish painting. This is my absolute

favourite Scottish painting. This, to me, is what Scotland's all about.

One of the great changes in the 18th century was homes have

barometers in them, it's something that ordinary people start doing,

is tapping their barometers to see whether today is changeable to fair.

People have thermometers and so where Bruegel couldn't measure how

cold his snowy scene was, it was only measurable in terms of what he

felt on his skin. But for the 18th century artist,

this is a very particular kind of cold. This is however many degrees

below zero. So when we talk now about

"the coldest winter since records began",

we're really looking back to this time in the 18th century,

when it occurred to people to start measuring.

The casual grace of the Skating Minister, apparently immune

to the bite of the Scottish winter, reflected a general lack of

concern in these enlightened times for the threat from the weather.

Protected in their modern houses in the terraces

of Edinburgh's New Town, it seemed science and rational thought

could solve all the problems that beset their superstitious ancestors.

Winter was merely a natural consequence of the rotation

of the Earth, and held no fear for men of learning.

But the hubris of the Scottish Enlightenment's attitude to

the weather was nothing compared to that of the newly appointed

First Consul of France.

Napoleon Bonaparte was confident he could conquer

winter as a first step on his way to conquering the world.

The Great St Bernard Pass, crossing the Alps between France

and Northern Italy, was the scene of one of the most successful

surprises in military history.

Even today, the road through the pass is only open in the summer,

but in the winter of 1800, Napoleon marched his army

through these mountains.

This extraordinary feat was painted by the French revolutionary

enthusiast, Jacques-Louis David.

His dramatic and inspirational portrait was designed to put

Napoleon up there with the greatest generals of all time.

In the pantheon of military greats there is a special place

reserved for those who have campaigned in winter.

It's the ultimate challenge.

I mean, look at this painting, it's the apotheosis of heroic leadership.

He looks calm, collected, the windswept hair,

his mighty stallion rearing in the air,

his finger pointed towards Italy and his enemies.

This is the foundation myth of Napoleon as a warrior,

leader of the French people.

Napoleon's goal was the re-conquest of Northern Italy,

and his enemies, the Austrians, were waiting for him in Genoa,

confidently looking west along the coast for a French invasion.

By taking a short cut across the Alps, Napoleon arrived unexpectedly

at their rear and won a great victory at the Battle of Marengo.

The most remarkable thing about this

is that David never saw this pass, Napoleon never even sat

for this portrait. He simply said he wished to be painted

"Calme sur un cheval fougueux" -

"Calm on a fiery steed."

And that's exactly what David has done for him here.

David was a believer, he was a political believer.

He believed in the French Revolution,

and I think when he painted this, he believed in Napoleon.

This is a vision of Napoleon as more god than man.

One thing about David, he's not a landscape artist.

He is only interested in the crossing of the Alps

as metaphor, as a historical image, so nature was only there

to set off the man.

50 years later, when another Frenchman, Paul Delaroche,

painted the same event, the metaphor was gone.

The only thing his far more historically accurate picture

had in common with David's version was Napoleon's hat.

Delaroche produces a very, very different painting

but one, in fact, that is just as heroic because it's a far

more realistic impression of the incredible odds that Napoleon

had to overcome in order to get his army across this pass.

We see, not a mighty stallion,

but a mule pressed into service from a local village.

The men behind him had their hats couched down, trying to keep the wind

from blowing them off. Napoleon's breeches are mud-spattered,

he's wearing his campaigning greatcoat, huddled against the cold.

And he has a guide here, a peasant guide, leading him.

The mighty First Consul of France in the hands of a Swiss peasant.

Whichever version you buy into, what both these paintings do is provide

evidence of the enduring obsession with people for Napoleon Bonaparte.

Very embarrassingly, as a teenaged boy

I had this painting on the wall of my bedroom, just as I was

developing a great love of military history. And whatever you thought

about Napoleon Bonaparte as a man, as a general, as a force of nature,

he's one of the most exceptional commanders who has ever lived.

It seemed perfectly reasonable of the Austrians to have ignored

the possibility that Napoleon would arrive this way.

The challenge of taking an army over this pass was unimaginable.

At nearly 10,000 feet, the thin air makes every footstep an effort.

At the very top of the pass is the Hospice of St Bernard.

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch but no-one told Napoleon.

The religious community up here have been providing

life-saving hospitality for centuries.

But I doubt they ever had a more demanding guest

than Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon was famous for saying an army would march on its stomach,

he was a famous logistician.

And while they were here, the consumed 22,000 bottles of wine,

a tonne and a half of cheese, and nearly a tonne of meat.

He was also famous for being quite rapacious.

He didn't tend to pay the bills that much and he certainly never paid the

bill up here. But eventually, the monks got their own back.

Francois Mitterrand, president of France, visited this wonderful

monastery in the 1980s, and he finally, after about 200 years,

paid the bill.

Napoleon's achievement continued to inspire painters,

becoming even more celebrated in the late 19th century.

Outside, in front of the hospice, Edouard Castres painted this

scene of the passage of Napoleon's soldiers.

I'm looking down on Italy.

And behind me, several hundred miles, is Paris.

If you draw a line from Paris where Napoleon was to the Austrian

army in Northern Italy, you come through here.

Standing up here on the top of the world, he must have thought

he had winter licked. He was a commander like no other.

But 12 years later, it turned out he was a mere mortal, after all.

He invaded Russia without the necessary supplies

and winter clothing, and half a million of his men died.

In the end, winter got its own back.

In the years following his remarkable feat in this pass,

Napoleon seemed invincible, a situation that led to a great deal

of soul-searching in the nations he defeated.

In Dresden, the work of the Romantic landscape painter,

Caspar David Friedrich, reflected this brooding, sombre mood.

Caspar Friedrich is born at a very interesting time in German history.

On October 14th, 1806, Napoleon had crushed the

Prussian army at Jena Auerstedt, and the Prussian army was

considered the greatest professional army, at the time, in Europe.

So this caused a real crisis in the way Germans and the German nations

thought about themselves.

They'd been defeated in the war and they really felt, well,

"Who and what are we, where are we going,

"we've got to reconstruct ourselves."

What they find in this dark wounded space, is the Gothic sensibility.

You might find vampires, you might find ruins,

graveyards, areas which, represent melancholy, represent the sublime,

represent terror, represent fear, represent anxiety.

These are the areas that are really becoming more interesting to romantic

writers and painters.

The picture itself is a fairly grim image.

Winter is obviously very bleak, everything's dead.

We have in the forefront the snow-covered ground,

a landscape of monks, of burial, and out of that comes these,

almost fingers, or skeletal trees, grasping at the light which is

coming from the sky.

And at the top you see this little circle of the moon,

which is suggestive of the redemptive force of Christianity.

The Christian message of Friedrich's picture is not immediately evident.

The ruined gothic tracery and bleak winter setting offer little comfort

to a believer, but Friedrich's northern European Protestant faith

led him to explore new ways to paint the experience of divinity in a

secular world.

I think it is radical, I think it would have been really

startling for people looking at this

at the beginning of the 19th century.

We look at it and I suppose we see Gothic horror,

and tropes of horror films and Twilight, perhaps,

but for them it was something that was new.

If you look at Christian art in the Catholic period

it's full of stories and people and stuff.

What he's doing as a good Lutheran is trying to look in nature,

and finding evidence of the sublime, evidence of God, by looking

into the book of nature, as Calvin would have put it,

and reading in the book of nature,

evidence of the presence and the purposes of God,

and that would have been a new thing.

Friedrich uses the power of nature

to heighten the drama of his picture.

In winter, in the face of this barren, unforgiving scene,

we feel the need for solace more than ever.

I mean, to a Christian, God in winter comes as no surprise because

the incarnation, the birth of Jesus is

something that happens not, you know, in bright sunshine

and not in a fanfare and blaze of glory but somewhere very unexpected,

the back of beyond, in the darkness of night, in winter, and the birth

of a baby, in a manger. That's become so familiar to us

we forget sometimes how surprising it is, but I think there's something

about surprise, the sheer, counterintuitiveness of it,

that Friedrich tries to capture.

At the heart of Christianity, is Christ crucified, abandoned on the

cross, who cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

which is a cry which the world would seem to take up in the dead of

winter, when the earth stands hard as iron and it's cold and it's

wretched and it's miserable, and that's that sense in Friedrich.

He doesn't underestimate that at all, he doesn't gloss

the darkness and the fierceness and the cold,

but he never loses grip on the hope that's implicit in it, too.

It's very subtle.

The subtlety of Friedrich's Gothic imagination would ultimately see his

powerful imagery become the stock in trade of the horror movie, but his

popularity has been very variable.

Though this painting had been bought by the King of Prussia,

by the time of his death he was largely forgotten.

Friedrich was revived in the early 20th century,

specifically by German Expressionist filmmakers who directly take their

ideas from Friedrich. Now this is interesting because Friedrich's

painting, of course, comes straight after a terrible German defeat,

by Napoleon, and in the same way, this same anxiety,

this same introspection comes straight after the First World War,

with the rise of German Expressionist cinema.

We see this in films like Dr Caligari,

which deals specifically with mental illness,

and with Nosferatu which deals with the invasion of a

foreign, plague-ridden vampire, into the midst of a German town.

The cinematic drama of Friedrich's dark winter landscapes was a sombre

Germanic response to the Napoleonic Wars, but for his restless British

contemporary, Joseph Turner,

the fighting was merely an irritating inconvenience that

prevented him from travelling to the continent.

In 1802 he managed a brief visit to Switzerland during a lull in the

conflict, but he was still using the sketches as inspiration eight years

later when he painted this view of an avalanche in the Alps.

He's a painter's painter, you could say that Caspar David Friedrich,

his great German contemporary, is a photographer's painter,

he has a kind of stillness which appeals very much now.

But Turner is about what painting can do, what oil paint can do.

This is paint making a world and then smashing that world

and then stirring it about

and then loving the results.

Winter, avalanche, snow, blizzards,

these massive forces give Turner the opportunity to depict abstract

energy and colour. If you wanted to depict the kind of abstract

mystery of blinding whiteness, snow was the opportunity to do so.

Bruegel saw that in the 16th century, and Turner sees it again.

Snow for him is an opportunity to blast apart

the conventions of realism.

The British liked their conventions though,

and took some persuading to see mountains in a new light.

The Alps were generally regarded as something rather unpleasant

and dangerous, to hurry through on your way to more congenial pleasures

further south.

The philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, put up the shutters on his coach

with a shudder as they hove into view.

Turner, the son of a London barber who grew up in Covent Garden,

was struck dumb by their majesty,

but their effect on his great friend and champion, John Ruskin, was akin

to a divine revelation

and it was his love of mountains that would bring about a profound

change in our attitude to the whole idea of what winter was good for.

Ruskin was first brought here by his parents

when he was about 14 years old, in 1833,

and, the experience, it's only fair to say, was religious.

He felt that seeing something this beautiful,

this astonishing, was absolute proof positive,

that there was a benevolent God.

Ruskin we remember as an art critic, but long before he became interested

in painting he was fascinated by geology. Had he not become an art

critic he would probably have become England's greatest geologist.

Long before the problems that are raised by Darwin with biological

difficulties with Genesis,

in fact, geology was the science which really started to inflict the

wounds much earlier than Darwin. And Ruskin says that every time he

reads his Bible nowadays, he hears the chink of the geologist's hammers

at the end of every cadence, and it's as though there's a literal

undermining of his faith by these people with their little pickaxes.

So geology at once leads him to God and leads him away from God.

It's a really fascinating paradox.

Above the town of Chamonix, on the slopes of Mont Blanc,

Ruskin recorded the progress of the Mer de Glace glacier.

It's really amazing to look at this

because Ruskin, though he didn't give himself any great airs

as an artist, was very precise and if you

look at the upper part of this engraving, you see the skyline is

absolutely identical, every little chip, every little spur, every

little needle, exactly the same.

But then if you come down and look at the lower half of the picture,

it's completely changed, it's dropped 150 metres.

While Ruskin the artist painted the valley,

Ruskin the scientist, an early enthusiast for the new medium of

photography, made this Daguerreotype image of the scene.

But for the local population, whichever way you looked at it,

the glacier was a malevolent thing.

We tend to think about glaciers as being relatively static,

relatively immobile, but in fact,

this particular gigantic flow of ice one year advanced by as much as

450 metres, eating into local farmlands, destroying local livelihoods.

There was a cartoon done at the time of the

glacier as a kind of voracious white dragon, eating its way down through

the hills with its wings spread out behind it, wings of snow.

Ruskin would have loved that, for him dragons encapsulate everything that

was evil, and in fact this whole

area used to be known as the cursed mountain, the Mont Maudit.

Bishops used to have to come and sprinkle holy water over it to

diffuse the evil spirits.

So, by loving this place so much, by saying that it's actually not a

place of evil but a place of beauty, Ruskin was really going against a

very substantial folk tradition in the area.

The farmers of Chamonix were never going to love the glacier as Ruskin

did, but he won an increasingly adoring following

back home in Britain.

His passion for this landscape was so infectious that,

almost single-handedly, he started the fashion for winter tourism.

Ruskin has to be held culpable for developments

that would have made him weep.

With all due respect to the people who come here for their vacations,

that's fine, but had Ruskin seen the ski lifts, had he seen the

cafes, had he seen all the attendant paraphernalia,

I'm afraid he would have broken into tears.

Another of Ruskin's favourite views is on the other side of the valley.

Today the ski lift cuts short what, for Ruskin,

would have been a quite considerable expedition,

climbing several thousand feet above the town.

This view across Chamonix to what used to be called

the Waterfall of Madness, Cascade de la Folie,

was a scene he was particularly fond of.

It's a very fine piece of work and of course it's charged with Ruskin's

notion that this is as close as you

can get, almost literally, to paradise on earth.

Ruskin is a late romantic, which is one way of saying that he learned to

find beautiful things that previous generations had found completely

ugly, snow for example.

In some ways his love of snow is an extension of

his love of geology, in general, and of precious

stones in particular.

It's as though the mountainsides around us were simply cascaded with

beautiful white jewellery, but, of course, no-one

before Ruskin would have seen it that way.

This was all completely new to people as an aesthetic idea,

but Ruskin was so trusted that they followed his example, I mean, it's

almost impossible to exaggerate quite how much faith the broad,

Victorian-educated public put in Ruskin, he has almost no

counterpart in the modern world, you have to combine David Attenborough

with Terence Conran with Jamie Oliver, or whatever. None of those

even, none of those people singly, none of them put together, had quite

the sway over the British public and were held in quite such affection

and respect.

Like Bruegel, Ruskin used his art to completely change the way people

thought about winter. The precision

of his draughtsmanship tamed the Alps and made them seem accessible.

He established the idea that winter

was something you could visit for a holiday.

But his obsessive pursuit of accuracy was about to be turned on

its head by a group of young Frenchmen who admired Turner as much

as he did - but for all the wrong reasons.

In their own way, the Impressionists were just as keen on accuracy,

and were obsessive about something they called "snow effect,"

the elusive colour of the shadows in a snowy landscape.

This is Monet's first stab at snow effect, painted in Honfleur in 1867.

As paintings, I personally think Monet's snow scenes, are the best

since Bruegel. He's a painter of light, he's a painter of

transitory effects, impressions, he's not interested in, sort of,

underlying realities of things, he's interested in what it looks like

right now, right now before my eyes as it changes.

And it's that sense of the passing world, the effect of light on snow,

these incredibly light, sensitive, graceful capturings of passing

moments, this is what Monet's about.

The notoriety of the early Impressionist exhibitions did not

immediately lead to financial security for Monet. In 1878, poverty

forced him to move to a rented house, shared with another family,

in the village of Vetheuil, on the banks of the Seine,

40 miles from Paris.

Soon after the family moved to the village, Monet's wife Camille became

seriously ill and, after the birth of their second child,

her condition deteriorated.

He was often forced to choose between paint or medicine for his wife.

In a letter he said,

"I haven't been able to work for a month now, lacking all colours."

When you know what Monet was going through, in his life at the time,

it makes you feel really differently about this painting. Monet is in the

winter of his life, so it's fairly apt that it's so snowy.

It's that bit where snow has gone from being really beautiful

to being just like junky and dirty.

It's not pristine snow, it's not about smoothness and purity,

and everything looking peaceful, it's sort of out of

control a little bit.

I suppose that's probably how he felt at the time, out of control.

What you can see here, are people.

You don't see it at first because they're almost completely engulfed

in the landscape, they're more like ghosts.

And I think that's, incredibly poignant, as what's about

to happen is that he will lose Camille. And she'll become a ghost.

Camille died in September 1879.

Some 40 years later, Monet described to a friend

the thoughts that went through his mind

as he sat next to their bed, looking at her corpse.

"I caught myself in the act of mechanically analysing

"the succession of appropriate colour gradations

"which death was imposing on her immobile face.

"Tones of blue, of yellow, of grey.

"Even before I had the idea of setting down the features

"to which I was so deeply attached,

"my organism automatically reacted to the colour stimuli,

"and my reflexes caught me up in spite of myself,

"in an unconscious operation which was the daily course of my life."

In this painting, she seems to be cocooned in ice.

'This is such a tragic picture of Camille.'

It might seem macabre that he was painting her on her deathbed,

but, actually, it's completely what you have to do,

what HE had to do.

This compulsion to cherish her, and treasure her

and, I guess, to not lose her completely.

Trying to capture her in the brushstrokes, and stroking her.

Because every single mark, is, that brush and that's a caress.

And it's this kind of terrible, painful moment

and the only way that he could have got through it is painting.

Camille's death was followed by a brutally severe winter.

On the 10th of December,

the temperature reached a record low of -25 degrees.

The Seine froze over completely.

But by the thaw, Monet had managed to sell

some of his winter landscapes of the village,

and was busy painting the vast blocks of ice

as they broke up and drifted downstream.

His time in Vetheuil was to prove the turning point in Monet's life.

He gained confidence, raised his prices,

and his career began to prosper.

Financial success for the French Impressionists

was cemented by an exhibition that took place in 1886,

and featured over 40 of Monet's paintings,

but it didn't happen in Paris or London.

It happened in New York.

After suffering years of critical scorn at home,

the Impressionists were immensely successful

on the other side of the Atlantic.

Monet's dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, said,

"The American public does not laugh. It buys."

In a great cultural exchange,

many American painters travelled to Paris

to learn about Impressionism first-hand.

Amongst them was the man who was to become

the pre-eminent American Impressionist,

Childe Hassam.

"The man who will go down to posterity

"is the man who paints his own time

"and the scenes of everyday life around him,"

said Hassam, and there was certainly lots going on to paint.

New York was just beginning to emerge

as one of the world's great cities

with its own distinct style and culture,

and needed its own artists to recognise its changing status.

Hassam loved snow and painted it wherever he was.

He made this picture in his native Boston.

Like Monet, Hassam wanted to paint the elements

as he saw them in front of him at that moment,

and was equally fascinated by the winter light,

but his most enduring images of winter are of New York.

This picture shows horse-drawn cabs struggling down Fifth Avenue.

For Hassam, capturing winter in New York

wasn't a question of getting out in the sunshine

and exploring the snow effect in the shadows.

He wanted to paint the blur of driving snow

in the teeth of the storm.

During that same winter, on the same street,

a similar scene was created

by another man who saw himself as an artist,

but he was using a camera.

This image is probably

the world's first successful photograph of falling snow.

Alfred Stieglitz was born in New York

but spent ten years as a young man in Europe.

When he returned to his native Manhattan,

he was fired with enthusiasm for photography,

convinced it was the art form of the future.

At a time when serious photography required a bulky plate camera,

Stieglitz purchased a smaller 4x5 inch model

and began to photograph life on the streets of New York.

His return to the city coincided with a run of terrible winters,

and many of his most famous pictures

are scenes of Manhattan in the snow,

like this photograph, The Terminal.

'Winter in New York is brutal.

'It is absolutely brutal.'

But what really happens in New York

in the winter is life slows down,

people stay inside as much as possible.

So I imagine that Stieglitz had...

I imagine he had a lot of fun walking around the city

and kind of seeing it laid bare a little bit more,

just like leaves fall off trees

and you get to see the skeletons of the trees,

you get to see kind of the inner workings of the city

a little bit more, because there's less life on the street.

In this picture you can see the curve of the tracks

where the streetcars made their turn

before going back north up to Harlem,

and actually, this bus right behind me

is following almost exactly that same curve,

as it too turns around to go north.

This picture is a window into the past.

It's a glimpse into New York

at a moment when it was changing incredibly rapidly.

The 1890s was really the period

where New York went from a local city to being a world capital.

It was winter that drove those changes

and really forced the city to become what it is today.

Like the enlightened Scots 100 years earlier,

19th century New Yorkers felt secure in their modern city,

immune to the perils of the natural world.

But winter likes to remind us of our frailty from time to time.

The Great White Hurricane,

a blizzard that hit the city on the night of 12th March 1888,

killed 200 people and almost every form of infrastructure failed.

The city was left paralysed,

with no functioning transport or communication.

By the end of the 19th century,

lower Manhattan was turning into a financial capital of the world,

and it relied on communication.

Telegraph and telephone wires,

and then, soon after, electrical wires as well.

When they had a hard winter, like during the blizzard of '88,

ice would form on those wires

and the weight would cause the poles to come down or the wires to snap.

That made the city decide

to start enforcing the rules that were already on the books,

that the utility companies had to put these wires underground,

and you can see from these two pictures

the drastic difference that made, right?

It cleared out the street, which isn't very clear these days.

But for a while, it cleared out the streetscape.

For Stieglitz, there was no question what made the streetscape look best.

Whenever it snowed, he would set out with his camera

to capture New York transformed.

He photographed the birth of the city we recognise today,

like this view of the Flatiron building in the snow,

at the dawn of the skyscraper age.

Always experimenting, he dramatically cropped this picture

to emphasise the building's verticality.

"It appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster steamer,"

Stieglitz said, "A picture of a new America still in the making."

As a prodigal son of New York,

he returned to the city with a European modernist's eye.

This picture, City Of Ambition,

helped to establish the Manhattan skyline

as a futurist Utopian icon,

But the street plan still betrays

the original landscape it was built on.

There's a clue about what used to be here in the name.

Canal Street. It used to be a canal that drained lower Manhattan.

Now the drainage ditch is still here. It's today a sewer,

and it was actually New York's very first covered sewer.

When you get a big snowfall, for example,

and all of that snow melts

and you don't want it flooding the streets,

that has to go out to the rivers.

Steve describes himself as a guerrilla historian

and his explorations of lost urban infrastructure

are not always done

with permission from the relevant authorities.

So I try not to have an audience sometimes when I do this,

cos they wouldn't always understand.

To my mind, what's really cool is that when you go underground,

you can go into the past.

You can see how the city used to be.

Still flowin'!

SIRENS BLARE

Even today, blizzards can threaten loss of life,

but centrally-heated urban environments

insulate us from the harsh reality of extreme climate events,

and from the patterns of the year.

At the end of the 19th century

the population balance shifted rapidly.

More and more people became city dwellers,

and sought to remove the possibility

that climate could interfere with commerce.

Winter seemed irksome at worst, and as the last snow melted away,

the fatal power of the cold was forgotten.

In pursuit of the elusive connection to the seasonal rhythms,

the Italian painter, Giovanni Segantini

left the industrial city of Milan where he had grown up

for the more extreme climate of the Alps.

Painting in the mountains above the Swiss town of St Moritz,

he rediscovered the power of winter as a metaphor for death.

Housed in a museum dedicated to his work,

the triptych, Life, Nature and Death

showed landscapes from the local Engadin valley.

"Death" is a winter dawn.

Giovanni Segantini, he was really attracted to winter

because it was such an extreme season for him.

The white of the snow fascinated him,

and he really played also with the light and the colours,

because the reflections in winter are so much stronger.

So for him, it was just something magic.

You can basically feel the crispy air in his paintings.

That Segantini became a painter at all was something of a miracle.

He lost his mother when he was only five years-old

and his father took him to a sister in Milan

and there he had a very gruesome and difficult childhood.

He was actually a street kid.

But he didn't feel comfortable in a big town like Milan

so he was looking for nature.

He just wanted to go higher up, and that was towards the light,

towards the mountains.

The picture shows a family group

watching as two undertakers carry a body to a waiting horse-drawn sled.

Above the mountains hovers a large, billowing cloud,

glowing in the dawn sunlight.

His art took the physical reality of winter

and gave it a strongly metaphorical form.

Romantic and mysterious, but always rooted in the landscape.

I think he chose to represent death in winter

because it's such a brutal and almost cruel season.

He wanted to show the grandiosity of the mountains, of nature.

That that would overcome the pain of the loss of this child.

I would say the direction of the horse,

that it would carry the child, the dead child, towards the light.

So there is some sort of hope after death.

Segantini would take his vast canvases to his subject

and work in the open, constructing a temporary wooden shelter

if the weather turned against him.

He became immensely successful in his lifetime,

with works exhibited all over Europe,

but his mother gave up Austrian citizenship

whilst omitting to replace it with anything else.

Stateless, Segantini was unable to leave Switzerland.

He was a very solitary soul and he wasn't able to travel,

so his only choice and passion

was actually to stay in his mountains

and try to get the beauty and the light,

this very, very special light,

and that was actually the quest of his life and painting,

to really show the world

the beautiful magic light of the Engadin and the mountains.

Whilst working to finish this picture

he spent long hours at high altitude in the mountains.

The strain weakened him.

He developed peritonitis and died in his painting hut

overlooking the Engadin valley that he loved.

He was 41.

THEY PLAY "SHOUT" BY THE ISLEY BROTHERS

In St Moritz today,

it's difficult to see winter as a metaphor for death.

In temperatures of -20 degrees,

the frozen lake becomes a horse-racing track

to stage the White Turf Festival, and its accompanying party.

These revellers, like the Londoners on Hondius' frozen Thames,

or the Venetians at their carnival, are perfectly happy out in the cold.

But this cavalier attitude to the temperature

requires the certainty of a refuge from the cold.

For the homeless, winter was still a killer.

In the rapidly expanding city of New York,

a group of artists, later known as the Ashcan School,

gave winter an urban setting every bit as uncompromising

as Segantini's portrayal of death.

On the margins of society,

the bums of Manhattan,

the subject of this picture by George Bellows,

were still vulnerable to the cruelty of a bitter winter.

What I love about this picture is Bellows really captures

the eternal New York story,

which is, "Out with the old and in with the new."

The Queensboro Bridge, which we're standing under,

hasn't even opened yet.

It's about to open in, I would say, three or four months.

This is probably early 1909, and the bridge opens in May.

And the bridge signifies new New York.

The city is expanding and growing

and the subways are only about five years old.

These are all tremendous changes in the city.

And these men have no place in it.

These men are pushed under the bridge.

What Bellows is telling us is they're New York's refuse.

They're New York's trash.

The Ashcan painters saw themselves in opposition

to the whimsical impressionism of Childe Hassam

and had more in common

with the documentary photography of Stieglitz.

Winter was a frequent subject for both,

but for Bellows especially,

his art had a powerful social conscience.

I think winter underscores

the rawness and the cruelty.

This isn't fluffy, wonderful snow

that you're playing in or that's exciting and beautiful.

This is a raw scene.

This is a cold, March day,

where the wind is coming off the river.

They're huddled by a fire, but it doesn't matter.

You know in their bones they are cold.

And if they have a torn boot, their feet are wet. They feel it.

This was a whole neighbourhood

of tanneries and breweries and slaughterhouses.

I mean, it was a pretty filthy, disgusting place.

You can just imagine how bad it smelled.

Nobody in New York City wanted to live near the rivers.

That's why Fifth Avenue became such a posh street at the time.

It's the centre of the island of Manhattan.

It's as far away from this as you can get.

The aim of the Ashcan School was to celebrate an urban vitality,

capturing spontaneous moments of everyday life.

But Bellows was also keen to document

the rapid change in New York,

and he knew that both the tenement building

and the men huddled in its shadow

would soon be swept away by the expanding city.

The light is brilliant, and what's interesting about the painting

is that at the top of the tenement,

and at the bridge and the sky, the light is very redemptive.

You can imagine the people who were on the bridge

or who will be on the bridge in a few months,

going across in this great, grand new city,

you know, everything's light and beautiful and promising.

And underneath it, where nobody can see,

these men are swept under the bridge.

Literally swept into the shadows of New York City.

Another Ashcan painter

with a romantic love for New York was John Sloan.

The great thing about painting the city, he said,

was that landmarks are torn down so rapidly

that your canvases become historical records

almost before the paint on them is dry.

Sloan loved winter.

He caught perfectly the impersonal and solitary nature of urban life,

and by setting his subjects in winter,

he gave them another reason not to linger on their journey,

hurrying home to the warm.

He recorded the last days of the "El" trains,

the elevated tracks that had failed in the blizzard of 1888,

and had been rendered redundant by the subway.

Sloan was fascinated by European movements like Cubism,

and struck up a friendship

with the pioneer of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp.

On a bitter, winter night in January 1917,

Sloan, Duchamp and several friends broke into the Washington Arch,

in the artistic ghetto of Greenwich Village.

It was snowing lightly

and the Arch Conspirators, as they called themselves,

decorated the roof with balloons and huddled in blankets,

drinking tea and moonshine, and letting off cap guns.

By having this party in what was supposed to be a serious monument

built by the city, they were making a claim on public space.

The event did have a serious purpose.

The United States was on the verge

of committing troops to the First World War

and the Arch Conspirators read a proclamation,

declaring the establishment

of the Free and Independent Republic of Greenwich Village.

There was a lot of fear at the time about saboteurs,

especially about potential anarchists.

The same thing has been happening since September 11th.

Today it's terrorists. Back then it was anarchists.

The fear is actually similar, and the way the city reacts

to people who want to try to make the city their own is often the same.

I see similarities with the way

that Sloan and his peers were painting at the time.

The Ashcan school of painting took

really, the existing landscape of the city and celebrated it,

things that seemed kind of banal.

So I love that. I think they were doing the same thing with this party.

They were taking this existing structure

and making it into their own, making it something fun.

I've always liked this thing a lot more, knowing that in 1917,

these crazy artists had a party all night at the top.

I wish I could have joined them.

The declaration of independence must surely have been written by Duchamp,

consisting as it did solely of the repetition of the word "whereas".

Whereas...whereas...whereas.

We declare the free and independent Republic of Greenwich Village.

The Independent Republic of Greenwich Village

failed to prevent the United States from entering the Great War.

Napoleon had abolished winter breaks in wartime

and there was no let-up in the slaughter on the Western Front.

The Battle of Cambrai in November 1917

saw the first use of large numbers of tanks by the Allies

but after a brief period of spectacular success,

the advance was checked,

the Germans retook most of the territory

and by the end of November,

things were back where they started.

Then it began to snow.

The German front line ran

just to the north of the hamlet of La Vacquerie,

with the British trenches the other side of an area of high ground

known as the Welch Ridge.

On 30th December, the Germans launched a surprise attack,

turning winter to their advantage.

The snow was two, three feet deep.

Everything was white and just before dawn, in the midst of a freezing fog,

they came over this slope,

all dressed in white camouflage.

And they were immensely successful.

And later that day,

the British decided to try and launch a kind of counter-attack.

This painting depicts the moment

when that regiment was ordered to go over the top.

Though later employed as a war artist, on this day,

John Nash was a serving soldier

fighting in the Artists Rifles Battalion.

You can see from the painting

that these guys didn't stand a chance

because everything here was white, everything in the painting is white.

Snow white, white clouds,

white mist, white surface,

and what are they wearing? They're wearing dark brown greatcoats

so the German gunners just pick them off.

80 men went over the top

and within just a few minutes, 68 of them had been killed

and, fortunately, one of the dozen men to escape unscathed

was John Nash, who painted this picture.

And I think one of the reasons he survived was

just before he went over the top, he took off his greatcoat

because he thought it was too conspicuous, too dark in colour,

and he wore a pale tunic instead, and that probably saved his life.

And this painting I just find incredibly powerful

because it's so...

It's so matter-of-fact, you know,

there's no sentimentality in it whatsoever

and it's the body language of these men in the row.

They're just sort of glumly trudging through the snow up this hill

towards what they know will be death.

These guys haven't even got out of the trench with their lives.

Other people have died the moment they've gone out.

This guy here has just been shot

and he's fallen down to his knees.

Nash hated painting figures. He couldn't paint figures very well

but he knew he had to do it with this painting because it was so important.

He thought what happened on these slopes was murder, pure and simple.

Like so many other actions of this conflict,

the attack Nash painted was largely pointless.

No progress was made

by the sacrifice of the lives of his comrades

and the few yards of mud over which they fought

remained a part of no man's land.

When most people think about the First World War,

what do they think of? Well, they think of mud and they think of rain

and they think of lifeless landscapes, trees without leaves,

they think of long nights and freezing soldiers.

What they're thinking about is winter.

That was what the First World War was.

It was a really long, brutal, murderous winter

but it wasn't a natural winter.

It was a winter that we manufactured.

This man-made misery inspired Nash's contemporary,

the young futurist painter Richard Nevinson,

to produce his greatest works.

La Mitrailleuse combined his fascination for machinery

with a horror at the brutality of conflict.

It was described by Walter Sickert

as "the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on war

"in the history of painting."

Nevinson, the son of campaigning liberal parents, was a pacifist

and worked in the trenches as an ambulance driver.

After the war, he continued to use his art as a platform

for social commentary, but in order to reach a wider audience,

he became a regular columnist

for the Daily Mail and the Daily Express,

becoming more curmudgeonly as he grew older.

One of his pet hates was football.

He had been a profoundly unhappy schoolboy,

sent away to boarding school at Uppingham

to allow his mother and father

more time to concentrate on their various causes,

and he associated winter with compulsory organised sport.

The misery of afternoons on the football field

was still fresh in his mind

when he painted this picture

in 1930, at the age of 41.

Nevinson would be horrified

by the idea that this painting would now be being used

to promote football in any way.

He despised all sports.

Right from when he was at Uppingham School and he was bullied,

he considered that sport was something for brutes, basically.

Nevinson was very much associated with the Italian futurists,

and in the Italian futurist manifesto, they included sport

as something that they felt was really important

to put right at the heart of culture.

And Nevinson did put sport within his art,

but he put it within his art to show us what a waste of time it was.

Nevinson never indicated the location of Any Wintry Afternoon

but the dark satanic mills that form its background

are always assumed to be in Manchester,

a part of the country he had rarely visited,

and for which he had a stereotypical southerner's contempt.

This painting really shows

that Nevinson thought it truly was grim up north.

The closer you look at this painting, the more of that you see,

whether it's the gasometer in the background,

the train, the steam coming off it,

the darkness, the thunderclouds, the rain.

Football had previously been seen very much as a northerner's game.

No London club had won the league up until this point

and there's always been great discussion

about whether the football teams in the painting

are Manchester United and Manchester City, or not.

And Nevinson was furious at the idea

that anyone should even be discussing this

and you can see, the tops are red and

the socks are blue. He doesn't care.

He's not trying to say

this is a particular player, this is a particular team.

He would say, "Well, you know, that's not the point.

"The point is, stop watching football."

It's often said that the Premiership era is the first time

where there's really been a major tension

between the money that is in the game, and the fans of the game

but actually, a very similar thing was happening in the 1920s.

This was the time when the first £10,000 footballer

had just been sold. The clubs were turning into businesses

and Nevinson wrote extensively about this in his very provocative columns

in The Mail and the Express at the time,

you know, openly hostile to what this was doing to our culture.

This painting goes to show

that really, he thought that sport was the opium of the masses

and he wanted the masses to stop taking opium, and to go

and do something else instead, that was a lot more cultured.

Nevinson's vision of winter is a far cry from Bruegel's.

400 years after the hunters' struggle for survival in the snow,

Nevinson's equally abject figures

are merely struggling to win a football match.

Had winter finally given up the fight?

During the 1930s, winters were noticeably milder.

Scotland experienced an almost complete absence

of significant snowfall in the winter of 1931.

The Reverend Walker's skates would have stayed in the cupboard.

For the first time,

scientists began to express concern that the world was warming up.

The US Weather Bureau concluded in a survey in 1934

that the winters were indeed colder and the snow deeper

when Grandad was a lad.

But winter wasn't giving up yet.

The euphoria that followed victory in World War II was short-lived.

Rationing continued, and there was a sense that

things weren't really working out for Britain in the post-war world.

In January 1947,

the country was plunged into the most severe winter of the century.

MUSIC: "Stormy Weather" by Etta James

# Don't know why

# There's no sun up in the sky

# Stormy weather... #

Power stations closed down for lack of coal,

and even the Houses of Parliament operated by candlelight.

The magazine Picture Post published a special edition on the crisis,

and chose a dramatic image

by the photographer Bill Brandt for the cover.

# Life is bare

# Gloom and misery everywhere

# Stormy weather, stormy weather... #

This was one of the great notorious winters in my lifetime, 1947.

I was only a 12-year-old boy in that winter.

I thought it was great fun but it was a wicked winter.

What this picture is