Date: 10-12-2000
Owning Institution: The National Gallery, London
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 17th Century      

With midwinter approaching, this week’s picture is Hendrick Avercamp’s A Winter Scene with Skaters Near a Castle. A busy work of art, teeming with anecdote, it shows a broad cross-section of seventeenth-century Dutch society – rich and poor, young and old alike – taking to the ice in holiday mood. Looking at it feels like studying a drop of water under a microscope. The past, in all its strangeness, swarms with vivid life.

The painter depicts a typical Dutch townscape traversed by a frozen canal. Husbands and wives and friends and lovers skate hand-in-hand, as if performing a quadrille, along the thoroughfare of ice. A wealthy family arrives in a richly decorated sledge drawn by a plumed and brightly caparisoned horse. A little boy bends to scoop up a handful of snow while another hurls his own already formed snowball at a fleeing girl, catching her on the back.

During the Middle Ages, Burgundian miniaturists had included vignettes of people surrounded by snowy scenery in manuscript illuminations illustrating the labours of the months. In the sixteenth century Pieter Bruegel the Elder had expanded on that tradition in several panoramic winter landscape paintings. But Avercamp, working some fifty years after Bruegel, was the first painter to specialise exclusively in the depiction of such subjects. Almost singlehandedly, he established the winter scene as one of the stock genres of Northern European painting.

The artist was, in part, responding to the new religious circumstances of his time. The Protestant Reformation, which had a particularly strong effect on Avercamp’s home town of Kampen, meant that painters could no longer rely on religious commissions for their livelihood. The rise of Calvinism, which proscribed religious art, led to the whitewashing of churches throughout the northern Netherlands. Painters were forced to court secular patrons and to devise new forms of art to entertain them.

Finely worked pictures such as Avercamp’s were luxury goods in seventeenth-century Holland. A Winter Scene with Skaters Near a Castle would have been owned by people like the more ornately dressed couples represented within it, such as the man and woman cutting a dash in the lower right corner. She in particular seems admirably poised. Skating cannot have been easy in a hooped dress. In the middle distance, as a comic reminder of the precariousness of the national winter sport, Avercamp depicts a man falling backwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. Behind him, three bystanders look on with broad good humour. Behind them, quite unseen by anyone else in the picture, another man frantically gesticulates as he falls through the thin ice just in front of the castle. Avercamp is not an overtly moralising painter, but this is a detail which might have prompted some members of his audience to graver reflections, accustomed as they were to reading images as emblems. The sliding or falling skater was a well-established symbol of “de slibberachtigheyt van’s menschen leven”: the slipperiness of man’s life.

Holland was regularly frozen over during the sixteenth century, when European winters were far more severe than they are today. Sir William Temple noted that “many times their havens are all shut up with winter and ice, while ours are free”. The ability to withstand such harsh conditions, and to make sport where others might complain of hardship, was a source of national pride among the Dutch. Dependent for its very existence on a complex system of canals and water defences, Holland was a country literally formed in defiance of nature. This may be a part of the meaning of Avercamp’s picture, which seems consciously designed as a celebration of hard-won community. Its round shape recalls that of the traditional map of the world, or mappa mundi, which suggests that the artist may have intended it to be seen as a kind of microcosm of his society. His gathering of different ages and classes also seems pointedly compendious, as if to suggest that this is a crowd which stands for all of Holland. Strengthening such insinuations, Dutch flags flutter from the masts of the idle boats while the plumes of the horse pulling the sledge are patriotically tricoloured: orange, red and blue. These are also the dominant hues of the painting itself. If it was painted in 1609, as most art historians now believe, it is scarcely surprising that it should have been coloured by national sentiment. That was the year when the Dutch Republic was officially founded, after the final overthrow of Catholic Spanish rule.

For centuries almost nothing was known about Hendrick Avercamp. Thanks partly to his habit of signing his pictures with a mere monogram, “HA”, even his proper name was a mystery. For more than a century after his death, his pictures were bought and sold as being by “The Mute of Kampen” – a nickname which led some scholars to believe that he had been a reserved and diffident man. It was not until the 1930s, when archivists working in Kampen stumbled across his mother’s last will and testament, that the truth was known. Avercamp’s nickname was no metaphorical allusion to taciturnity. He really was deaf and mute. In her will, his mother wrote that she was especially worried about her eldest, unmarried son, Hendrick. Because he was “stom en miserabel”, “mute and miserable” (by which last word she may simply have meant “wretched”) she stipulated that he receive the annual sum of 100 Carolus guilders from the family capital for the rest of her life. In the event, the precaution was unnecessary. She died in January 1634. Hendrick, who had lived with her almost all his life, died just a few months later.

Despite the warm, festive nature of its subject Avercamp’s picture does have a curious and slightly unsettling air of detachment. It is painted from a high vantage point, a conventional device for such panoramic landscapes, but one which here seems to carry a melancholic charge of feeling. A surprisingly large number of the people in the painting, especially those in the foreground, have their backs turned towards the painter. It is as if the whole scene is framed by their indifference, and by Avercamp’s awareness that he is cut off from the world which he depicts. He observes but does not participate.