Ice Scene

Hendrick Avercamp painted this around 1610, probably soon after returning home to Kampen from Amsterdam, and it still looks southern. After Antwerp fell to Spain in 1585, many Flemish families moved north, many of them to Amsterdam, and they carried Pieter Bruegel's way of painting a landscape with them. You see it in the tall bare tree framing the scene, in the stage-like layout, and in the crowd of small coloured figures.

A game of kolf, a forerunner of ice hockey, is under way. A woman kneels at a hole in the ice doing her washing. Near the bank four people have gone through, and help is coming with a ladder. The boat standing on end in the foreground served as a privy.

The panel belongs to the Rijksmuseum, which bought it in 1886 and has lent it to the Mauritshuis since 1924.