Lucas van Valckenborch’s painting Winter Landscape hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria and also all over my coffee table. It’s been there for about five days now, and its over 500 loose pieces have been reduced to just over one hundred, I’m guessing. My progress has been slow but steady, and certainly slower still since the onset of school on Monday.
We’ve had this puzzle for a Long Time now. Its box has been gathering dust on a shelf in our playroom for years: the last time we put it together was when William was a baby, and it was Bill’s idea the other day that we give it a second go. So on New Year’s day I pulled it down and dumped it out, and Will helped me turn over all the pieces.
I’d imagine that Bill and I spent hours on it together the last time, but I don’t remember that. Neither had I remembered the images in this puzzle, and this surprises me as, having worked on it and worked on it over the past few days, after having stared at the (complete) image on the box and then having studied the pieces, I feel that I have the thing memorized.
It’s amazing how it works, really– the mind, I mean– on something like this. Because spread out all over the coffee table, the pieces are virtually indistinguishable from one another. I mean, other than the edges with their giveaway-smooth side, the pieces themselves are odd shapes and swatches of color. But having looked at them and the picture for some time, and having begun to construct, from that chaos of fractured images, a picture that Makes Sense, I Begin To See.
I began with the trees: giving to them piecemeal their branches and trunks, the snow clinging to their sides. And then the figures began to appear: people trudging through the blinding snow; horses and reindeer pulling sleighs; boys with snowballs, bodies arched and arms raised. I began to remember– when searching to fill a blank space– that I had seen a face or an arm or a hand on a puzzle piece not five minutes before, and that sent me looking. Or I found a puzzle piece– the arm and hand of a boy stooped to form a snowball– and went hunting on the picture on the box to see where that might be.
I have thought more than once that this puzzle is too hard for me (the trees are many, and some share similar branches; the sky and snow and dimly visible background village are all shades of white and beige and blue; and over it all is the falling snow: white dots that coat every inch of the scene) but have pressed on nonetheless, and now it is Almost Done.
I think that, in my typical way, I will be sorry when it’s over.
I love the scene. This might be because, while Everyone Else north of here seems to have snow, we, once again, are bone-dry in the Carolinas: our skies are a persistent and maddeningly cloudless blue. It might be because, somehow, the scene reminds me of Switzerland, though it looks nothing like it: Van Valckenborch is Most Decidedly Flemish, and the gentle inclinations of his landscape are more distinctive of the Low Countries. I miss Switzerland, maybe (especially?) in the winter.
But mostly I find myself, as I work and work to place another piece, thinking of van Valckenborch himself. Where did he stand when taking in this scene, and how did he decide what to include? Why are some of the figures so hard at work (a woman and her son each carry large bundles of wood; the woman carries hers on her head), while others (the boys, everywhere) are reveling in the snow? I like, too, his use of color: the richness of the snow’s simple palette; the tans and tawnies, browns and blacks of the trees, clothes, buildings; the surprising reds and subtle blues that appear– just here, just there– all around the painting.
You can imagine yourself getting to know a painter when you study his work like this. You can begin to think that you understand him, that his perspective (while, granted, looking at a different view, a different part of the world than you) is similar to your own. See? you begin to think to yourself, he understands the world as I do.
This can’t possibly be, of course. For starters, this painting is over four hundred years old. Van Valckenborch and I have (had?) so little in common. I can’t begin to list the differences.
But I am not listing differences now. I am lost in the puzzle, looking, instead, for a piece shaped like this, and it must have dark brown here, see?, and white on this side, see?, because of the snow.
And I know (I find it and feel that satisfying friction as the piece slips into place) that I and van Valckenborch shared a love of winter. Yes, I know this for certain now. Because just see how he painted the snow (the snow!) and how it rests along the branches of the trees.
