Isaac van Ostade

In the 1640s, a young Haarlem painter began turning out small winter scenes: a frozen canal, skaters and sleighs, a low roadside inn with travellers stamping the cold from their boots. They rank among the finest Dutch pictures of their kind, and the man who painted them, Isaac van Ostade, was dead before he turned 30.

He had learned the trade from his older brother Adriaen van Ostade, a well-known painter of rowdy peasant interiors who had himself trained under Frans Hals. Isaac began by copying that world of smoky cottages and drinkers. Around 1641, setting up on his own, he moved outdoors instead, toward wayside halts and flat winter country in the manner of landscape painters like Salomon van Ruysdael. His best pictures hang the whole scene on a warm patch of light at an inn door, with the ice and grey sky pushed to the edges.

He worked fast and sold steadily in the few years he had. Isaac van Ostade was buried in Haarlem in October 1649, at the age of 28. He left no pupils, but his roadside and winter scenes shaped the next generation of the city's painters.