Anthonie Verstralen

Anthonie Verstralen was a painter of winter. His panels show frozen rivers seen from slightly above, with skaters, horse-drawn sledges and players of colf, an early Dutch game played with club and ball, spread out across the ice under a hazy sky.

He was born around 1594 in Gorinchem, a river town in Holland, into a family of cloth merchants that had moved there from Weert, further south. By 1628 he was working in Amsterdam, where he took up the manner of Hendrick Avercamp, the deaf painter from Kampen who had made the crowded winter scene his own, and after Avercamp's death in 1634 he became one of the city's main winter painters. Only a single summer landscape by him is known.

He died in Amsterdam in 1641 and was buried in the Westerkerk, the big Protestant church on the Prinsengracht.