Hendrick Avercamp, Frozen River with Skaters and Colf Players. Ca. 1620-1630
English | Nederlands
English
Frozen River with Skaters and Colf Players
Of all the different categories of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape, it is the winter landscape that makes the clearest reference to the origin of the genre: the precedents of modern landscape painting were the depictions of seasons and months in the mediaeval Book of Hours. In these illuminated calendars, the depictions of activities typifying each season or each month, usually set in landscapes, accompanied texts on the moral lessons of the passage of time. In the sixteenth century, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's panel paintings set off the development of several kinds of autonomous landscape painting. His Hunters in the Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a piece from his magnificent series, long served as a model for winter landscape specialists. Recent research has linked the extraordinary fashion for representations of winter to climatic change in Northern and Central Europe that caused relatively long, hard winters from 1550 up to about 1800, with much snow, the period known to science as the "Little Ice Age".
In the Netherlands, Hendrick Avercamp was the first master to specialise in depicting the joys of winter. Throughout his career, he exclusively painted snowy landscapes and frozen canals, with hosts of figures sledging, skating and hurrying after their daily task. In Amsterdam, where he spent his formative years, he familiarised himself with the Flemish precedents to the genre. The composition of the small-size Budapest picture recalls the Flemish model: the tondo format itself is a feature of sixteenthcentury Flemish landscape series, and the raised viewpoint and the relatively elevated horizon are based on the panoramic landscapes. The meeting of the sky and the land in the middle of the picture field opens up space for landscape motifs and activity on the ice. The trees and buildings rising on both banks of the capriciously meandering river both lend a special character to the landscape and adapt it to the circular picture surface. What we see is reality, but a reality which the artist has constructed from deliberately selected elements and made authentic by perfect, naturalistic rendition of the details. The red brick buildings to the left, with smoking chimney and icicles hanging from the snowy roof, the hens pecking in the yard, the fishing boat listing and frozen into the water in the centre, the windmill in the distance and, even further away, the towers fading into the mist, are all painstakingly observed and faithfully rendered details of reality. Slightly apart from the busy group of skating and walking figures, an old man approaches, as if towards us, with a basket of victuals on his arm. This white-bearded figure wearing a fur-edged hat features prominently in several of Avercamp's paintings, and harks back to his precursor personifying winter or the month of February. A symbolic element is thus combined with reality. The handling of delicate diffuse light and atmospheric perspective betrays the influence of the pioneer of Dutch landscape painting, Esaias van de Velde, and attests to an understanding of the new artistic devices. This allows the painting to be dated to Avercamp's mature period, after 1620.
Text © Ildikó Ember
Oil on oak, 30,5 cm
Szépmüvészeti Múseum, Boedapest (inv.nr. 1698)
Nederlands
Winterlandschap van Hendrik Avercamp met schaatsers en ijskolver uit ca. 1620-1630.
Olieverf op eikenhout. Doorsnede 30,5 cm.
Szépmüvészeti Múseum, Boedapest (inv.nr. 1698)