Winter landschap met schaatsers

In the Netherlands, natural ice and skating are inextricably connected. Whenever the canals, rivers and lakes freeze over, young and old, rich and poor all take to the ice en masse. The custom was already entrenched four hundred years ago. No one has depicted this age-old passion more beautifully than Hendrick Avercamp, the father of Dutch ice scenes. Avercamp’s most ambitious work, Winter Landscape with Skaters, still largely determines our picture of the bitterly cold winters of the Golden Age. With its high horizon, the Rijksmuseum painting provides an almost boundless vista of the activity on and around a frozen waterway. At the same time, this lively spectacle, with its amusing anecdotal details, provides a colourful display of the prevailing fashions in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In this edition of the Rijksmuseum Series Pieter Roelofs explains all you want to know about Hendrick Avercamp's famous painting, Winter Landscape with Skaters