Hendrick Avercamp

Hendrick Avercamp could not hear or speak, and was known in his own day as the mute of Kampen, the Dutch town where he spent most of his life. He turned that life into some of the liveliest winter scenes ever painted.

His panels look down on frozen rivers packed with people: skaters and sledges, a hockey game, fine ladies and beggars, someone fallen through the ice, a couple courting, all rendered in bright little touches of colour under a low pearly sky. He worked in the depths of what we now call the Little Ice Age, when European winters were long and hard and the canals reliably froze.

Because he could not easily take dictated commissions, he sold many of his scenes and drawings as finished goods on the open market, an early kind of art made for buyers rather than patrons. He died in Kampen in 1634, having built a whole career out of the one season his countrymen spent out on the ice.