A masterpiece of Dutch Golden Age winter painting, Hendrick Avercamp's 'Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters' (c. 1608) gathers noblemen, burghers, servants, fools, and beggars onto a frozen canal beneath a soft pink sky, all rendered in tiny, precise figures strewn over the ice. The austere silhouettes of bare trees and a distant city skyline anchor the composition, while hundreds of vignettes of play, courtship, labour, and misfortune unfold in miniature. Avercamp — deaf and mute, known to contemporaries as 'de Stomme van Kampen' — made this kind of winter scene his lifelong subject, helping establish it as a distinct genre of Dutch painting.

Exhibition Venue

Rijksmuseum

Amsterdam, Netherlands