Winter Landscape

Avercamp painted this around 1605, when he was about 20, and he was among the first Dutch painters to specialise in winter scenes. The layout is still an old-fashioned one, borrowed from Flemish landscape of the previous century. The horizon sits high, trees and houses step back along both sides, and the ice runs away between them into fog. Skaters, sledges and walkers are strung out across the surface as crisp dark silhouettes against the pale ground, getting smaller until they vanish in the haze. His monogram is on the little barrel standing between the trees. The panel was already in the Habsburg collection at Ambras Castle in Tyrol by 1663, less than 30 years after the painter's death.