| Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634): The Little Ice Age Exhibition
By STAN PARCHIN
November 3, 2009
| | Hendrick Avercamp (Dutch, 1585-1634). Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters (ca. 1608). Oil on panel. 87.5 x 132 cm (34.4 x 52 in.). © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. | 
| | Hendrick Avercamp (Dutch, 1585-1634). Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters (detail) (ca. 1608). Oil on panel. 87.5 x 132 cm (34.4 x 52 in.). © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. | 
| | Hendrick Avercamp (Dutch, 1585-1634). Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters (detail) (ca. 1608). Oil on panel. 87.5 x 132 cm (34.4 x 52 in.). © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. |
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum proudly premieres Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634): The Little Ice Age (November 20, 2009-February 14, 2010), the first exhibition devoted to 17th-century Holland's foremost painter of winter landscapes. Twenty paintings and 25 drawings are on loan from museums and private collections worldwide, including London's National Gallery, Budapest's Szépmüvészeti Múzeum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Hendrick Avercamp: Life and Career
Hendrick Barentsz. Avercamp (1585-1634) was born in Amsterdam, the son of an apothecary. After a childhood in distant Kampen, he returned to the prosperous port city. There he apprenticed with the Danish portraitist Pieter Isaacks (1569-1625).
Avercamp was a deaf-mute, referred to as de stom van Campen in Dutch. Despite his disability, he flourished under Isaacks' tutelage. He was soon influenced by the Flemish followers of artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525/30-1569), most notably the Mannerists Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1607) and David Vinckboons (1576-1630/1633).
Avercamp returned to Kampen in 1614. Separated from his Golden Age counterparts in Amsterdam and Haarlem, he continued to paint genre scenes of Holland's harsh winters, his insightful compositions known for elegantly dressed couples ice-skating, aristocratic gentlemen playing kolf (golf, a game similar to ice hockey) and children sledding. The artist's brightly colored panoramas also included images of daily life's hardships, such as peasants chopping wood to heat their houses, women washing clothes in freezing water and merchants selling their wares. Holland's frozen rivers and canals provided Avercamp with a common element that allowed him to describe a cross-section of 17th-century Dutch society visually.
Drawings
Avercamp was an expert draftsman. The exhibition's 25 works on paper include summer landscapes and outstanding costume studies, some richly colored and intended as finished works of art.
Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters
Avercamp's Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters (ca. 1608) is ostensibly a scene of pleasure and labor on and near a thickly frozen river. People skate joyfully while sleighs sail across the ice. Meanwhile, a reed cutter carries branches to heat his home. An eel fisher transports his catch in a net suspended from a trident over his shoulder. And a lonesome figure in tattered clothing begs for bread in the cold.
For anecdotal reasons, Avercamp incorporated risqué details into his painting. A person's bare buttocks emerge from a small boat. One man relieves himself against a tree; another urinates into a ditch. A pair of promiscuous paramours copulates in a haystack. In the work's foreground is a brewery, its façade curiously bearing Antwerp's coat-of-arms. Whether these people's lewd behavior is a result of inebriation from patronizing the local establishment is a matter of speculation.
Dutch Baroque iconography considered, some scholars feel that scenes of frivolity on ice refer to the slippery or unpredictable nature of the human condition. The bawdy imagery in Avercamp's Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters may indeed have been intended for its moralizing effect, a plausible conclusion given the influence that Pieter Bruegel the Elder's art had on the painter early in his career.
After its appearance at the Rijksmuseum, "Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634): The Little Ice Age" travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from March 21 to July 6, 2010. Source
Roelofs, Pieter (ed.), et al. Hendrick Avercamp, Master of the Ice Scene (exh. cat.). Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2009. | | | |