Enjoying the Ice near a Town

Enjoying the Ice near a Town, painted in 1620 and now in the Rijksmuseum, belongs to the core of Hendrick Avercamp's celebrated winter landscape production. The early seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic coincided with the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age, when rivers and canals froze reliably every winter, transforming Dutch waterways into public recreational spaces of great social vitality. Avercamp documented these scenes with an ethnographic thoroughness that has made his paintings valuable records of early modern Dutch social life — wealthy burgher families on fashionable skates, working people pulling sledges, children playing, fishermen maintaining holes in the ice. The 1620 date places this work in the middle of Avercamp's mature period, after he had settled in Kampen in 1613 following his early years in Amsterdam. The panoramic format — a wide, low horizon with a town silhouetted in the middle distance — was one of Avercamp's characteristic compositional strategies, allowing him to distribute a large cast of figures across a horizontal space without crowding. The Rijksmuseum's holding of this painting situates it within the national collection that also holds Avercamp's most celebrated winter panorama.

The panoramic composition is structured around a low horizon that maximises sky and ice while placing the town's skyline as a silhouetted backdrop. Figures are distributed in depth from foreground to middle distance through progressive scaling and diminishing detail. The frozen water surface is indicated through the near-white paint of the ice against darker areas of snow-cleared patches or open water.