A winter landscape with peasants skating and playing kolf on a frozen river, a town beyond

The composition is closely based on a lost drawing by Hans Bol. In 1570, a year after the death Pieter Brueghel I, Hieronymous Cock published a series of four engravings depicting The Four Seasons commissioned by Brueghel after drawings on which was working. His drawings of Spring, dated 1565, and Summer, dated 1568, are both in the Albertina. However, he was unable to complete all four drawings before his death and Cock turned to Hans Bol to supply those for Autumn and Winter in time to publish his engravings in 1570. Neither of Bol's drawings survive.

The present picture is an addition to the versions of this composition by Pieter Brueghel II and his studio recorded by Klaus Ertz (Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere, Lingen, 1999/2000, II, pp. 601-4, nos. 665-81). Of those, it relates closest to the only other version on copper (and of approximately the same size), that in the Musée de Grenoble (ibid. no. A678), which although not seen in the original, Ertz does not consider to be autograph. Marlier suggested an attribution for the Grenoble picture to Jan Brueghel I on account of the copper support (G. Marlier, Pierre Brueghel Le Jeune, Brussels, 1969, p. 238, no. 4).