Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634), A Scene on the Ice near a Town, c.1615, Oil on oak panel, 58 × 89.8 cm, The National Gallery, London
Few painters faced a tougher challenge than Hendrick Avercamp. In the bustling art market of the Dutch Golden Age, originality was hard-won, yet Avercamp staked his career on a single subject: the frozen waterways of the Little Ice Age, where society turned public space into social theatre. From this narrow focus he carved out an entirely new pictorial type.
Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) was born in Amsterdam into a family of apothecaries but moved as a child with his family to Kampen, where he would spend most of his life. Contemporary sources describe him as mute, probably also deaf, which earned him the name de Stomme van Kampen (‘the mute of Kampen’). His training under Pieter Isaacsz (1569–1625), a painter active at both the Danish and Dutch courts and steeped in Haarlem Mannerism, gave him a solid basis in figure drawing and taste for decorative refinement. Scholars also suspect he absorbed lessons from Gillis van Coninxloo (1544–1607) and David Vinckboons (1576–1632), whose landscapes and figure types echo through his own compositions. Yet what Avercamp created with his winter scenes was something new: a formula in which he set out, very consciously as a young man, to prove himself against the most crowded and competitive art market in Europe.
The Dutch Golden Age was a harsh place to earn a living as a painter. The market overflowed not only with contemporary works but also with paintings from earlier generations, imported from different regions and traditions. Within this environment, originality had to be visible and immediate. Avercamp’s response was the panoramic winter scene, drawn directly from the frozen canals and rivers of the Little Ice Age. These works appear cheerful at first sight, animated with skating crowds, lovers, drinkers, and children tumbling on the ice. But the more one looks, the more the atmosphere darkens. A note of melancholy hangs behind the bustle, a quiet stillness that sets the tone as much as the humour. It may be linked to Avercamp’s disability, his position as an outsider who watched the social theatre but did not take part in it.
If Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–1569) provided a model for winter scenes, Avercamp stripped away allegory and moralising. His panels are bluntly descriptive yet never merely documentary. At the same time, skating was too charged an image for viewers not to read moral meaning into it—life as unstable ground, pleasure as a dangerous risk. The works hover between affectionate detail and emblematic possibility, which is part of their enduring power.
The problem is that his oeuvre is uneven. Some early paintings are astonishingly refined, the main figures finished with crisp precision. Others, from the same period, feel sketchy. It is not easy to separate intention from condition. Many panels seem to have been built in layers, refined details laid over looser underpainting. Four centuries on, it is often the fragile glazes that have disappeared with the varnish, leaving a rougher surface than Avercamp meant us to see. This unevenness also complicates attribution, especially since his success generated a wave of imitation.
His drawings offer a more reliable insight into his working method. A greater number of securely attributed sheets survive than paintings, and these reveal the process of developing ideas in sketch form — figures noted from life, later adapted and reiterated as stock motifs within panel compositions. Stories on the ice were not invented afresh each time but developed and re-used.This also links him to a wider Netherlandish tradition. Already in the sixteenth century, painters in the Low Countries specialised in crowd scenes that balanced dozens of figures in correct proportion, something that was never common in Italy, for example.
The fragments of his biography add to the sense of distance. He lived between Kampen and Amsterdam, probably travelling with his mother, on whom he depended not only as a child but also as an adult restricted by his disability. What we know comes in scraps, reconstructed by scholars who are still piecing together the roots of his peculiar formula.
His career ended abruptly in 1634, probably due to plague. Yet the formula outlived him. His nephew Barend Avercamp (1612–1679) possibly collaborated with him and then carried on the winter scene for decades, his paintings often difficult to distinguish from Hendrick’s own. Other artists joined in, repeating the formula to the point that the field of attribution has become murky. Still, Avercamp had set the type: the animated winter panorama, packed with anecdote yet carrying a peculiar emotional charge. His surviving oeuvre is small—barely thirty paintings can be securely given to him—but reinforced by drawings that show the careful eye and steady hand behind the apparent spontaneity. These works defined winter as a lasting theme in Dutch art and left behind images that are not only lively records of public life but also haunted by a quiet, unmistakable melancholy.
