This is a Christmas-themed lecture about snow in art history. Do you remember that childhood feeling of enchantment on the morning after a night of snowfall? At that age you probably weren’t worried about freezing pipes and congested motorways but experiencing an inimitable thrill as deep and pure as the snow itself. Art history has a lot to tell us about that feeling, and the many other emotions that snow provokes. In European art, snow arrived relatively recently, with Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565) the first serious, large-scale consideration of the white stuff – snow’s joyousness, terror, and spirituality.