Winter Landscape with Skaters near a Village

Colf, a Dutch game played with a curved club and a ball, often on the ice, is one of the things going on here, along with skating, sledging and fishing through holes in the frozen water. Avercamp painted the scene around 1610 to 1615 on a wooden panel almost a metre wide, under three bare trees and a heavy grey sky. The picture belongs to Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, collectors in Massachusetts who in 2017 promised their Dutch and Flemish paintings to the Museum of Fine Arts, and it hangs in Boston on long-term loan. Six years earlier it had travelled with the rest of their collection in the exhibition Golden, which opened at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem in February 2011.