The Snowman

Three large snowballs of different sizes, and some other features like a carrot as nose, branches as arms and a top hat. Here comes the snowman. The earliest documentation of this anthropomorphic sculpture made of snow is a marginal illustration from a 1380 book of hours, found in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague — author Bob Eckstein writes about it in his book, The History of the Snowman. The earliest known photograph of a snowman was taken in 1853 by Welsh photographer Mary Dillwyn.

According to Bob Eckstein of Smithsonian, like some of man’s oldest forms of folk art, the snowman is, and always has been, a byproduct of man’s primal instinct to depict himself in art — before the age of Frosty, he was abused by children and exploited by advertisers. Today he is mostly the protagonist of funny cartoons or illustrations in which they play around with his weakness, that of ending up loose.