Emily Allchurch

The Six Seasons (after Bruegel)

In 1565, Bruegel the Elder was commissioned by the Antwerp merchant Nicolas Jongelinck to paint the ‘Seasons’, a series of six paintings following a calendar year in Northern Europe, with each painting representing two months of the year. The paintings Bruegel duly created were, in essence, an exploration of man’s then relationship, and interactions, with nature. The best known of the series, ‘Hunters in the Snow’, records a harsh winter in a period of intense climate change known as the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1

300-1850). Despite the hardship resulting from the bitter conditions and consequent food shortages, the painting illustrates man’s ability to endure and indeed find joy, evident in the games being played on the frozen rivers and ponds.

Allchurch’s new body of work, The Six Seasons, re-imagines Bruegel’s paintings, using assemblages of thousands of contemporary photographs taken in the English landscape. By recreating Bruegel’s paintings with images from today, Emily looks at the central theme of the ‘Seasons’ – man’s relationship to nature and the land – and asks what has changed in the intervening centuries, and what has stayed them same.

Five of Allchurch’s images are based on the surviving paintings that are now distributed across three countries and two continents: The Hunters in the Snow, The Gloomy Day, and The Return of the Herd in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; The Harvest in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and The Haymaking at Lobkowicz Palace, Prague Castle. The sixth painting, however, has long been lost. Allchurch re-imagines the missing painting as ‘The Six Seasons – Late Spring (after Bruegel), “reuniting” it with its companion pieces.

“As we live through our own period of climate change, I wanted to update the series from a contemporary perspective, reflecting on the fragility of nature and the seasons as we have known them, and how our interventions with landscape, mostly through leisure and tourism, are managed and mediated. With its focus on the everyday and ordinary, and a subtle underlying commentary on how we connect with nature and the landscape today, I hope ‘The Six Seasons’ series successfully captures our present moment in time.” 

Previous work

Closer to Home (2021)

Throughout 2020 and 2021, whilst largely confined to her home in East Sussex due to the pandemic, Allchurch sought solace in her daily local walks, taking photographs of the townscape and countryside through the changing seasons. This inspired a series of digitally collaged landscapes, that both celebrated her immediate environment while offering a reminder of its precarious fragility. The works explore themes of landscape management and control, the threat from development, coastal erosion, invasive plant species and detritus and how we interact with the landscape through tourism and recreation. Whilst some scenes capture the more obviously aesthetic vistas like the South Downs, others find beauty in the everyday, such as blossom flowering on an urban estate or the unfurling of new weeds in the spring. In her trademark referencing of old master prints and paintings, she has once again - as in Tokyo Story of 2011 - adopted the portrait format and near/far composition technique used by Hiroshige in his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. In a departure from previous work however, the compositions are largely her own and the twelve resulting mages from an extraordinary calendar year form a tender portrait of the East Sussex landscape.

Prices available on request.