Frolicking on a Frozen Canal in a Town, Hendrick Avercamp (copy after), c. 1615 - c. 1620 – (Hendrick Avercamp) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Hendrick Avercamp

Date: 1620

Size: 47 x 87 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

This unsigned ice scene was purchased by the museum in 1884 as a work by Willem Pietersz Buytewech. Three years later, Bredius assigned it to Esaias van de Velde in the museum’s catalogue.2 In 1984, Keyes associated it with a monogrammed ice scene by Hendrick Avercamp (fig. a).3 This composition with skaters and kolf players shows exactly the same location, the northern perimeter canal outside Haarlem, near the St Janspoort city gate, with the Kruispoort in the background and the Pink mill behind it.4 Although the figures in Avercamp’s original are fewer and smaller, the correspondences in the staffage are unmistakable. Striking details found in both paintings include the woman looking out at the viewer on the right who is having her skates tied on by the kneeling man, the icebound boat in the foreground, and the seated figure attending to a call of nature.5 Although the figures betray a practized hand, it is not clear who painted this scene. The style is different from Hendrick Avercamp’s. The attribution to Esaias van de Velde, on which Van Gelder had cast doubt back in 1955, is no longer tenable.6 Keyes was the first to propose the name of Jan van de Velde II.7 Van Thiel8 and Van Suchtelen9 adopted that attribution. Among other things, Van Suchtelen saw similarities in the fanciful pattern of highlights that is also found in the monogrammed oval winter landscape in the Rijksmuseum that is attributed to Jan van de Velde II (SK-A-3241).10 However, the basis for an attribution to the graphic artist Jan van de Velde is wafer thin. There is no clear overview of his painted oeuvre,11 and the differences between the small winter scene monogrammed I.V.V. in the Rijksmuseum and the present painting are greater than the similarities. This large work is considerably more detailed and was more meticulously executed, and the slick figures in opaque paint, most of which were reserved in the background, hardly bear comparison with the rapidly painted staffage of the small winter scene. The palette is also much more colourful. The most sensible course for the time being is to regard the Rijksmuseum’s variant as a copy after Hendrick Avercamp. It would have been painted not long after the original, and can be placed in the second half of the 1610s.12 Gerdien Wuestman, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 13.