This landscape and another entitled Summer (Royal Collection) seem to have been a pair in the collection of the Duke of Buckingham, but may not have been when Rubens originally executed them for his own amusement and delight. It is possible that Rubens attached the 60 cm strip to the left-hand side here (adding everything to the left of the upright just behind the farmer leaning on his fork) in order to make the widths identical. Rubens seems to have enjoyed ‘growing’ his landscapes without any particular purpose. This is a typical example of an ‘original’ composition which works very well as it is - with a simple barn stage, framed by the farmer and his wife - to which he has added a new episode and almost a new vanishing point.

This scene is a rare example of Rubens exploring the mundane technology of farming, and as such it belongs with his Prodigal Son of 1618, and a group of drawings of farm labourers, apparently observed from life. Rubens’s Prodigal Son is a powerful treatment of the biblical subject, not just an excuse to paint a farmyard and it is tempting to look for something similar here. In a general way a depiction of a barn in winter is reminiscent of the Nativity. There are other allusions which suggest that Rubens wishes to encourage us to explore the meaning of the figures in this scene: the boy blowing on a coal refers to a lost antique painting by Lycius, pupil of Myron, and made famous through Pliny’s description of a ‘boy blowing a dying fire’ (Pliny XXXIV, 79). There is also an echo of the three ages of man, with the children, their mother and grandmother, whose grotesque yawn is a typical piece of low-life comedy in the tradition of Bruegel. The subject of a woman tending several children, with an exposed breast, would remind a seventeenth-century viewer (at least one educated enough to be visiting Rubens) of an allegory of Charity, a virtue also suggested by the crippled beggar (shoeless with a crutch) who has been invited to join the family by the fireside. The message of the Nativity is thus conveyed without depicting Bethlehem.

The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated 'Royal Residences' of 1819, hanging in the Blue Velvet Room at Buckingham Palace (RCIN 922144).

Along with Summer, original framed by 'Two very large Carv'd & Gilt Picture frames for 2 Landskips of Reubin's ornamented w.^th Festoons & flowers all round ditto w.^th Mosaick work in y.^e Ground & a Canopy of Flowers at y.^e top all in Burnished Gold' (WRA, Geo. 54559)