A Frozen Canal near the River Maas

This canvas was painted in 1867 and bought for the national collection that same year, so it went almost straight from the easel to the museum. The scene would have looked familiar to Dutch viewers from their own 17th-century painters, who had made skating on frozen rivers a subject of its own, and Schelfhout deliberately echoes them. The view is wide and calm and nearly drained of colour. Skaters glide across the ice and a horse-drawn sleigh moves along it. On the left, people drag wood home on a sled, and on the right bank stands a farm near the river Maas. Nothing dramatic happens. It is an ordinary winter day, set down with care, and the Rijksmuseum now hangs it in its gallery of Dutch Romantic painting.