The Seasons

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The cycle of the year has organised images since medieval calendars matched each month to its labour. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1565 series of the seasons includes Hunters in the Snow (1565), with tired men and dogs trudging down toward a valley of skaters. Nicolas Poussin's late The Four Seasons (1660–64) pairs each season with a biblical story, from the paradise of Spring to the Flood of Winter.

In Japan, seasonal flowers and grasses carry precise associations in poetry and painting. Sakai Hōitsu's screens Flowering Plants of Summer and Autumn (c. 1821) set rain-bent summer grasses beside autumn plants tossed by wind. Claude Monet painted grainstacks near Giverny through summer, autumn and winter in 1890–91, and the Swedish painter Gustaf Fjaestad became known for close studies of snow and frost. David Hockney's The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods (2010–11) filmed one Yorkshire lane at each time of year with nine cameras.