Winter Landscape

In the 1640s Rembrandt often walked out beyond the gates of Amsterdam with pen and chalk, drawing the farms and waterways around the city. This panel, painted in 1646, is barely 17 by 23 centimetres, about the size of one of those sheets, and it is his only painted winter scene. The paint went down wet into wet, and the museum's technical study shows where the little dog's legs were reworked while the paint was still soft. That speed once led people to believe he painted it outdoors, though no painter of his day is known to have worked that way. Ten years later, when his possessions were listed in his bankruptcy, the clerk recorded four small landscapes made “from life”. In the distance, beyond the horse dragging a sledge across the ice, a tower has been identified as the obelisk at Spieringerhorn, on the road from Amsterdam to Haarlem, a landmark Rembrandt also put into an etching.