What did the first snowman look like? And who rolled it? In the early 2000s, Bob Eckstein, the world’s foremost (only?) snowman historian, went searching for an icy Adam and its mittened creator, and arrived, four years later, on an illumination from a late-fourteenth century medieval book of hours: folio 78v of MS KB, KA 36, held by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague. It shows a rather sympathetic snowman, arms and legs already liquified, getting roasted “alive” over a hellish grate. Textual descriptions stretch further back. A Daoist monastic manual known as the Fengdao Kejie (early seventh century) describes religious icons “carved in ivory, cut in wood, shaped in piled-up snow”. But perhaps the snowman and the caveman knew each other too. Whenever the mimetic impulse first struck humans, snow made for an easy putty with which to sculpt uncanny models of ourselves.

It can be difficult to trace the snowman’s development due to its ubiquity (and the solubility of historic specimens). “With the exception of religious figures”, claims Eckstein, “the snowman is the single most recognized icon in the world.” A winter presence across centuries — from Europe to the Americas, Asia to Oceania — the snowman’s personalities are as varied as its sculptors.

Early modern snowmen were often abominable. In 1511, at a festival in Brussels, locals expressed their ambitions and frustrations during a long, plague-filled winter by constructing more than one hundred snow statues, which were catalogued in a ballad by the poet Jan Smeken. As the scholar of medieval Dutch literature Herman Pleij has written, about half of the statues depicted sexual or scatological themes: a snow centaur defecated; a frozen nun seduced a wild snowman with her lollepot (ostensibly a foot warmer); the red light district was piled high with steamy scenes. Less risqué statuaries have frequently appeared after blizzards across European history; a 1772 whiteout in Antwerp, for example, led to such brilliant neoclassical creatures that engravers put on their boots to capture these forms.

One particular snowman haunts the Renaissance: in his teens, Michelangelo once packed a very beautiful sculpture for Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici (at least according to Vasari) after a heavy storm in 1492, only for it to melt a few days later. Yet Walter Pater believed that this vanished snowman held a key to the Florentine artist’s particular technique: “Something of the wasting of the snow-image which he moulded”, Pater wrote, lurks about his other statues and their “puzzling sort of incompleteness”. Ever since, this lost brother of David has haunted the art historical mind. “All art aspires to the condition of snowmen”, thought the scholar T. J. B. Spencer, swerving on Pater’s claim about the condition of music. “A work of art that survives outside its own age is inevitably impaired by time, the destroyer as much as the enchanter.”

The advent of photography in the nineteenth century offered snowmen a form of extended life, refrigeration through frozen light. Contra Spencer, a photograph not only survives its own time, it embalms the likeness of its subject too. Inverting Keats’ urn, the photoed snowman remains forever cold and still to be enjoyed. Photography is the medium of snowmen’s dreams. What can better freeze a scene and ensure that spring’s ablation never comes?

The earliest known photograph of a snowman was taken by Mary Dillwyn, circa 1853, the first female photographer in Wales. The bright exposure of the salt print makes him almost invisible, as his body fades out into a field of white light. From there, Frosty’s cousins flocked to have their portraits taken. Our selection below contains “Mr Snow” with a Fu Manchu, a gigantic Azerbaijani iceman, the towering Alaskan “Father of the Glaciers”, a slushy Muscovite from 1906 (as surprised to see us as we are him), a criminal snowman cuffed by Australian police, Dalmation-like humanoids with leaf-pocked skin, one “snow suffragette”, one snow Queen Victoria, rotund bon vivants, Michelin Man–adjacent nightmares, and many more wonders raised from fallen powder. What’s most notable about the photographs here — taken in Finland, France, Turkey, China, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere — is the consistency of these compositions. A group of people (children, soldiers, geishas) pose before loveable, baffled, and slightly creepy mounds. (We’ve used the familiar “snowman” in this piece, but most snowmen are androgynous — sculptures that are specifically women are rarer, but more common still than explicitly masculine figures, unless the tobacco pipe a man does make.)

In other media, the snowman assumed more varied forms across the twentieth century. As Eckstein notes in his History of the Snowman, the end of prohibition did wonders for the American snowman, who, around 1934, “established his reputation as a fun drunk”. The convivial iceman was wont to overdo it, however. Greeting cards, posters, and tchotchkes from this period depict snowmen as leering at young girls or softening beneath the gaze of a beautiful woman. Sculpted, without opposable thumbs — or even arms — the modern snowman is often subject to forces beyond his control: a careening sled, a bully’s boot, the bayonets of bored infantrymen. He can serve as a scapegoat, the target for society’s snowballs, though this itself is nothing new: our medieval ur-snowman above may have been intended to demean a Jewish person, on account of his hat.

And the snowman’s popularity has far from melted away in the cultural imaginary. The Sechseläuten festival in Zürich has taken place on the third Monday of April since the early twentieth century and involves incinerating a giant snowman effigy (Böögg) to banish winter (and, in earlier times, disaster) from the city, à la Burning Man on ice. In film, the snowman probably deserves a lifetime achievement award. From Georges Méliès’ lost La Statue de Neige (1899) to Netflix’s 2024 made-for-streaming romance Hot Frosty, the snowman’s connotations on screen are ever mutable (heart-warming Frosty; vengeful Jack Frost), much like the substance that forms its epiderm. Were the search expanded to twentieth-century advertising, we would alight on a veritable mob of ice-cold admen, keen to sell weatherstripping, cream of wheat, perfume, salt, sausage, cigarettes, you name it.

The anthropologist of art Alfred Gell once described what he called the “homunculus principle”: how, in belief systems across the world, masses affixed with eye-like apertures are animated with an agency that appears almost human. There’s something of this magical transubstantiation in the snowman too. Roll an ephemeral white substance that fell from the sky into three large balls. Stack them one atop the next. Add some fruits or stones for eyes, a carrot nose, maybe a pipe or cap, and suddenly Galatea rises proudly from the frost. But the stakes are minimal — this is no golem or Pinocchio. You can play God for a day, swapping snowflakes for clay, and your creation will melt back into the earth come spring. Unless, that is, you take a photo . . .

For the art history of snowball fights, see our post from a few winters past. For more photographs of snowmen, see artist Eric Oglander’s wonderful collection.