Winterlandschaft mit Eisläufern

Avercamp painted this around 1608, near the start of a long cold stretch when Dutch winters really did freeze the canals solid for weeks. He sets the viewpoint high, so the whole town seems to pour out onto the ice at once. Nearly two hundred small figures skate, flirt, push sleds, play an early form of golf, beg, slip and fall. It looks like pure holiday until you follow the detail. In the left foreground a horse has frozen to death, and a dog and some crows have found the carcass. Avercamp was deaf and mute, and worked much of his life in the town of Kampen. The crowd he watched on the ice is the subject he returned to again and again.