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Dimensions: 9 3/4 by 10 3/4 in.; 25 by 27.5cm
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Provenance: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK
Lord Rothemere;
Francis Springell;
Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, January 15, 1987, lot 30;
There purchased by a private collector.
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Exhibited: Manchester, City Art Gallery, Exhibition of Works of Art from Private Collections in the Nothwest and North Wales, September 21 - October 30, 1960, no. 101 (lent by Mr. and Mrs. Springell).
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Literature: Illustrated London News, October 5, 1960, vol. 237, p. 604;
C.J. Welker, Hendrick Avercamp...'Schilders tot Campen', 1979, p. 216, no. S72.1.
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Notes: Avercamp was the first painter to record serially the delights and pleasures of a winter's day, and he did so in virtually every one of his paintings. It is a matter of record that winters in the 16th and 17th Century were harsher than they are today, and the rivers and lakes of the Eastern Netherlands where Avercamp lived were frozen hard for several weeks or longer in most years. Thus the subject matter on which Avercamp based his career was a far from fleeting phenomenon.
Avercamp worked in relative isolation in the town of Kampen, then a Hanseatic port of dwindling importance on the eastern shores of the Zuider Zee. Avercamp's isolation was not merely geographic. Contemporary sources from as early as 1613 describe him as Stomme, and his muteness was probably caused by deafness. Avercamp's winter landscapes, therefore, record a world observed but not heard, populated with people whom he could see, but with whom communication would have been limited. This may perhaps explain why the figures in his paintings, even when placed in the foreground, are always, except in some very late pictures, placed at a certain physical distance from the viewer, and although they are seen talking to one another, they are rarely to be caught looking out of the picture plane. They are, nonetheless, acutely observed, with affection or amusement, or both. In fact Avercamp adapted a traditional manner of landscape depiction in which the viewpoint is above, and removed from, the foreground figures, which give them a natural detachment from the viewer.
Avercamp uses a variant of the Flemish tradition of aerial perspective by showing the distant figures, trees and houses through the frozen mist caused by the ice cold air: the effect is progressive, so that the buildings, windmill and trees on the horizon are barely visible, as if in a mirage.
Since no painting by Avercamp is dated between 1609 and 1620, it is not a simple matter to date his works accurately. The pictures from 1608 and 1609 are much closer in composition to the earlier Flemish landscape tradition, with a much higher horizon line. By 1620 Avercamp's compositions had ceased to rely on coulisses, such as trees and buildings to structure his pictures, and the horizon line and viewpoint is lower. Some of the later works, probably dating from the last decade of the artist's life share much with the present composition. They employ a much lower horizon line, and a viewpoint level with the heads of the foreground figures which are large and are seen in close proximity with the viewer.
One of the previous owners of the painting, Francis Springell, was a collector and authority of the work of Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677).
