Winter Landscape with Skaters

Entry

This is not only one of Avercamp’s early works but is also the largest and most ambitious winter landscape he ever painted. He was the first Dutch artist to depict winter and its recreations, and in doing so he built on the example set by his southern Netherlandish predecessors. The high horizon, the quite complex buildings making up the village, and the prominent bare trees that serve as repoussoirs, recall the work of Flemish immigrants in Amsterdam like Hans Bol and David Vinckboons.²

The tall trees in the left and right foreground act like stage flats by drawing the eye into the composition. The recession into depth along the frozen river that has burst its banks is suggested by the succession of buildings and trees, and in the middleground by the wooden posts marking the route taken by the ferry.³ The transition of the colours, ending with almost white tints merging with the sky in the distance, creates an aerial perspective. Rising up behind the farmhouses in the middleground on the right is the unrealistic detail of a barely visible white mountain with a flour mill on top. Although the narrative and anecdotal nature of the scene can be found on a more limited scale in the work of his Flemish contemporaries, Avercamp’s pronounced realism gives his paintings a character all their own. He took a rare delight in depicting events on the ice, which he did with a great feeling for variety: children and adults are out for a stroll on the frozen river, people play kolf, the forerunner of golf, there are sleighs and, in the distance, ice-boats. One picturesque detail on the left is the fisherman with his eel spear over his shoulder.⁴ The meticulously detailed costumes show that the figures are from all classes of society.

The prominent building in the left foreground with the two lions from the Antwerp coat of arms is thought to be a brewery or an inn called The Half Moon (‘De Halve Maan’ are the words on the sign board). Here, too, there is a mass of narrative detail, such as the bare buttocks on the lavatory on the left, the amorous couple on the haystack, and so on. In the left foreground is the half half eaten carcase of a horse with crows and a dog around it, and there is a bird trap surrounded by footprints in the snow. Avercamp took the latter detail from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap of 1563, which he could have known from one of the many copies,⁵ in which there is the same high horizon and similar silhouetted trees.

The Rijksmuseum painting dates from the period of Avercamp’s Winter Landscape in the Billedgalerie in Bergen (Norway),⁶ which is related to it in composition, palette and the level of the high horizon. From the same period or a little later there is the slightly smaller but equally ambitious Winter Landscape with Numerous Skaters in Schwerin,⁷ in which the horizon is a little lower but the palette is comparable. A subsequent stage in the artist’s development is represented by Ice-skating in a Village (SK-A-1320), where the horizon is considerably lower.

Details like the bird trap, the gnawed carcase of the horse and other details have led to speculation about hidden allusions to the fragility of life. Brueghel’s bird trap had already been associated with the dangerous slipperiness and unreliability of ice.⁸

Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 10.