Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Games on the Frozen River IJssel

Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Games on the Frozen River IJssel
around 1626
Washington DC National Gallery of Art, Woodner Collection
(image source: NY Times)
no copyright infringement intended

That game was most likely colf, a hockey-like Dutch pastime that some scholars say influenced golf and was even played in the U.S. (source: NY Times)

It's Avercamp at his best! A landscape (well, winter landscape, people playing a game on a frozen lake, because it's Avercamp, wtf), but a landscape with a narrative: each personage (including the dog) has a reason to be there, has a role to play; each one is important there in his own right (and own nuance of color), Plus the nuances of the sky, as the sky is also a personage, with a role to play in the foreground, and another one in the background. Plus  the boat in the distance, because the lake has its history, too, with boats, and fishing, and a little commerce; now it's frozen.



(Hendrick Avercamp)

Hendrick Avercamp

Hendrick Avercamp
1585-1634
(image source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

Dutch painter and draughtsman who spent most of his life in Kampen; nicknamed De Stomme van Kampen (the mute of Kampen, this coming from his speech impairment); famous for his winter landscapes, featuring abundant amounts of people skating on frozen lakes; the epoch he lived remained known as the Little Ice Age, which explains his thematic (by the way, the Little Ice Age occurred after the end of the Medieval Warm Period, so I am wandering what will come after the present-day Global Warming); as icy as it was that period, his paintings breath warmth, are full of joyous life and funny details; his passion in depicting skating characters seemingly comes from childhood, when the boy was an enthusiastic practitioner of all kind of ice sports; the bulk of his artwork is now at Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis.

• Winter Games on the Frozen River IJssel

(Old Masters)