Winter landscape with skaters

Hendrick Avercamp's Winter Landscape with Skaters (1608) is one of the most joyful and beloved images in Dutch Golden Age painting, depicting the frozen canals and rivers of Holland transformed into stages for the full spectrum of Dutch social life. Avercamp was the great specialist of the winter landscape in early Dutch painting, and his panoramic views of frozen waterways populated with skaters, sledges, and onlookers were enormously popular with Amsterdam collectors. The winter landscape had a long precedent in Flemish painting from Bruegel onward, but Avercamp gave it a distinctive Dutch character, centering on the democratic sociability of the frozen canal where all classes of society mingled in shared pleasure.

Avercamp employs a panoramic format and high viewpoint to accommodate the extensive social scene, with figures distributed across the ice in varied groupings. His palette is cool and wintry — greys, pale blues, and tawny earth tones — enlivened by small touches of red and yellow in the skaters' costumes. Fine, precise brushwork captures the animation of the busy scene.