Skaters

Toorop made this in 1885, in his years as a plain observer of everyday life. The scene is a crowd at the edge of the ice, and what holds the eye is how he paints the people. They have no individual faces. They read as a mass of dark shapes, a throng of skaters pressing to get onto the frozen water. It is winter caught as movement and weight, an ordinary Dutch cold-weather ritual. He kept the whole group at enough distance that no single face resolves out of it.