WHAT does the Grindelwald Fluctuation have to do with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s much-loved 1565 painting The Hunters in the Snow, the winter scene that, over the years, has graced countless Christmas cards and Advent calendars? Or with the flurry of Dutch 17th-century canvases showing jolly burghers skating—and tumbling—on frozen canals? Or the paintings of the London frost fairs, which saw tented villages pop up on the icy Thames and the river turn into a slippery theme park? Or another seasonal greeting-card staple, Henry Raeburn’s portrait of the 1790s showing the Revd Robert Walker skating gracefully and determinedly across a Scottish loch? The answer is that, without the Grindelwald Fluctuation, they might well have never been painted.
There was nothing new about snow and ice, but they became prolonged features in everyone’s lives
It is the name given to a period during the ‘Little Ice
