Andreas Schelfhout

Andreas Schelfhout painted his first frozen-canal scene at 19 and his last at 81, and in between the Dutch bought so many of them that the little winter pictures earned their own nickname, Schelfhoutjes, or "little Schelfhouts."

He had come to painting sideways. In The Hague he first trained as a gilder and frame-maker, then apprenticed to a decorative painter, and only began showing landscapes of his own around 1815. What sold was the ice: skaters leaning into a grey wind, sleighs on the bank, the broken chunks along a channel catching the light like glass.

By the middle of the century he was the most sought-after landscape painter in the Netherlands and a teacher at The Hague drawing academy. One of his pupils was Johan Barthold Jongkind, the Dutch painter who later moved to France and helped push the coming generation toward Impressionism. Schelfhout kept to the older Romantic manner to the end, working his careful winters right through his eighties.