Winter Landscape

The whole scene is about the size of a postcard, and it is full of people on a frozen waterway. Some push sledges, others skate, and a few are playing kolf, a Dutch game in which players drove a ball across the ice with a curved club toward a post. The ice runs back so far that it seems to have no end, and the bare tree in the foreground, drawn dark against the sky, pushes that distance even further.

Winter pictures like this sold well in the Dutch towns of the 1610s, and Van den Berghe made this one as the partner of a summer landscape of exactly the same size. He signed it in an unexpected place. Look at the barrel at lower left: his initials CVB are painted on it, joined together in a single monogram.