Hendrick Avercamp in the Little Ice Age.

Climate change is a phenomenon well known to all contemporaries but a lesser known fact

is that major climatic changes also occurred in the past. Of particular interest to us is the period

commonly called the Little Ice Age, a relatively short period characterized by long cold winters

between the fourteenth and nineteenth-century which affected particularly the Northern Europe and

the Netherlands with continuous snowfall and frost1. The first and most obvious effect of this

whether was the transformation of entire rivers in vast expanses of ice for months but the cold also

caused profound changes in the everyday life, especially many dangers for the population often

subjected to periods of isolation, famine, etc. The continuous state of war that affected the

Netherlands between the sixteenth and seventeenth-century worsened the situation considerably.

The first severe winter of this age, the first to be mentioned in the contemporary chronicles, like the

Nieuwe Chronijcke van Brabant, as well as the coldest of the next fifty years, was that of 1564-

1565. This winter was particularly important for the history of art because it marked the beginning

of a new type of landscape, specifically winter. Actually the winter landscape was not a new subject

for the Flemish or Dutch art, but it had never had a starring role before. The artistic tradition up to

that time had made use of the winter landscape in a very allegorical concept, vanitas in the first

place, as well as pendants to other landscapes in the cycles of seasons or months2. The Limbourg

brothers, for example, in the Tres riches heurs de Duc de Berry, decorated in 1411-16, represented

the labours of the respective months in full-page, naturalistic landscape. Actually the month of

February is the first naturalistic winter landscape of the history of Western art. In it, the late Gothic

style of its illuminations (lack of a realistic perspective, cross-section view in the interior of the

house of farmers, etc.) approaches the realistic representation of the life of shepherds and farmers

struggling with seasonal work. The Limbourg brothers' illuminations, however, remain unique in

the fifteenth century, followed at a great distance from the work of Simon Bening of Bruges who, in

the first half of the sixteenth century, decorated the agendas of his books of hours with full-pages

winter landscapes just like the Limbourg brothers, but showing to know the innovations of the

Renaissance, without losing the freshness and the typical daily taste of Flemish art3.

Meanwhile, the winter landscape appeared more often in the background of the

personifications of the winter, a type of representation derived from antiquity and spread in the

Netherlands. But we have to wait for the above mentioned years 1564-65 to assist the emergence of

the winter landscape itself, in its own right. That winter was so hard and overtime to remain deeply

1 Suchtelen 2001, pp. 12-15.2 Suchtelen 2001, pp. 28-35.3 Longnon, Cazelle 1969; Suchtelen 2001, pp.36-37.

engraved in the collective imagination of Dutch and Flemish provinces. The Scheldt River, which

flows through the city of Antwerp froze completely and was immortalized in a woodcut by Bernard

van de Putte, while a large iceberg (ysgebercht) ran aground near Delft and was portraited in a small

panel by Cornelis Jacobsz van Culemborch, who did in fact the first winter landscape of the

northern Netherlands4.

The real landmark in the development of netherlandish winter landscape is the work of

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569), who in 1565 painted a series of panels, a total of six,

representing the months5. One of the still existing five panels, Hunters in the snow (fig. 1), now in

Vienna, is the representation of the winter months (December and January). In it we see a group of

hunters in the foreground who are heading to a village, further down the valley, crossed by a frozen

river where the people are having fun skating and playing, while the gaze is lost in a distant horizon.

In this painting we can see two main features: first of all, there are no specific references to an

extraordinary episodes, as in the van Culemborch's iceberg, while it fits perfectly in the still young

tradition of representations of the months or seasons, with the works of daily life and the games on

the ice. The second thing to note is that the landscape is not recognizable as tipically south

netherlandish, except for the architecture of buildings and costumes of the characters, while the

mountains in the background, in the upper right, reflect the views of the Alps that Bruegel had to

cross to reach Italy. Therefore the morphology of the landscape is entirely invented, as usual in the

works of Bruegel, as well as in most of the previous Northern European painting. Bruegel drew or

painted many other winter landscapes in the same years. In an engraving taken from a drawing we

can see many skaters in front of the St. George Gate in Antwerp, while in the Census at Bethlehem,

painted in 1566 and stored in Brussels, the Biblical story is set in a landscape whose characteristics

are markedly south nederlandish but also completely invented, as usual for the religious painting of

the time. The sacred group, with Mary riding the donkey and Joseph holding the reins, occupies the

center foreground of the panel, but at the same time this group passes almost unnoticed in a crowd

of other characters engaged in their daily activities, hurrying to finish that before the sun sets

entirely behind the horizon6. Perhaps, in the context of the development of Dutch winter landscape,

the Bruegel's panel will have greater importance is the Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird-

trap (fig. 2) of 1565, which seems not to have an original membership in a series of seasons or

months, let alone a modern transposition of some biblical scene. It is the simple vision of a frozen

river on which several people are having fun skating while the attention is drawn to a trap for birds

in the foreground on the left. The trap apparently has a visual and symbolic value (probably

hampered the difficult search for food in winter in contrast with the apparent light-heartedness of

4 Suchtelen 2001, p.135 Sellink 2007; Roelofs 2009, pp. 33-34.6 Suchtelen 2001, pp.41-42.

the people who are enjoying the ice), but it still lacks a precise and explicit reference to traditional

themes. The trap that takes the value of a stylistic character is often reused by subsequent landscape

painters.

The second half of the sixteenth century saw the outbreak of the Eighty Years' War, the

revolt of the Netherlands against the political, economic and religious oppression of Philip II of

Spain. The vicissitudes of the conflict led to the division of the original Seventeen Provinces into

two entities, one in the south controlled by Spain, the other in the north controlled by the separatists,

who, among various events, were able to maintain their freedom, founding the Republic of the

Netherlands. The continuous state of war and the lack of religious freedoms forced many artists

from the Southern Netherlands to move increasingly towards the north in search of work and

stability. With them, the fledgling tradition of landscape painting crossed the Scheldt to reach the

mouth of the Amstel River, forming the basis of what will be the Golden Age of Dutch landscape

throughout the seventeenth century7.

One of the first artists who left his homeland because of these events was Hans Bol (1534-

1593), a native of Mechelin, who was forced to move first to Antwerp, finally arriving in

Amsterdam in the late eighties. He is the first and closer link between Bruegel and the subsequent

Dutch landscape painters, having worked in contact with the great master of Brabant which helped

to spread the work. To Hans Bol belong not only a series of drawings and prints that will have a

great success during the next century, he did also one of the first topographical winter views of the

Northern Netherlands. The winter landscape was certainly an integral part of the Bol's work, both in

Amsterdam and Antwerp, as we can see from the many drawings and prints belonging to series of

seasons. But he also made several miniature landscapes, characterized by vivid and bright colors

with scenes from mythology, religion and, most importantly in the context of the frozen landscape,

a topographical view of Amsterdam. The river Amstel in the foreground appears completely frozen

and literally covered with people enjoying themselves in various ways, while the city, with the

Oude Kerk perfectly recognizable, looms in the background. Any explicit symbolic or metaphorical

meanings seem left on the sidelines favouring the mere and accurate vision of the city skyline and

the entertainment of the citizens8. In those years many other artists from the south reached the

Northern Netherlands, helping to replant and innovate the landscape tradition. Gillis van Coninxloo

(1544-1607), David Vinckboons (1576-1630/33) were the first landscape painters of the northern

provinces. Certainly the issue was not unknown to the north but was relegated to the background of

the representations of historical subject, acquiring the full independence in the north after the arrival

7 Levesque 1998, pp. 223-257.8 People on the Ice near Amsterdam, (c.1589), Munich, Residenzmuseum, Miniaturenkabinett, 11x28,5 cm, Suchtelen

2001, pp.50-51, Leeflang 1998, pp.76-77. The works of Hans Bol are very limited in size, smaller than the already tiny paintings of Avercamp, he was actually specializes in this kind of miniature paintings and his studio in Antwerp was also involved in illuminating books, see Suchtelen 1996.

of these painters. With them appeared in the Netherlands the winter landscape, almost always along

the lines of Bruegel or stylistic reworking already established. It will be a Dutch painter to bring to

maturity this particular genre9.

Hendrik Avercamp, also known as the Mute of Kampen, was born in Amsterdam in 1585,

but spent his childhood in Kampen, an Overijssel town where his family moved shortly after the

birth of the painter. He lived mainly in Kampen and was buried in this city in 1634. The

informations about his artistic education are few and ambiguous, but it must certainly be in

Amsterdam in close contact with the milieu of painters emigrated from the south. Another issue

regarding the biography of Avercamp is on his handicap. He was in fact commonly appealed as

"Mute of Kampen," but we do not know exactly if he was just dumb or deaf, or even if it was just a

nickname, does not exist precise documentation on which to build a solid theory, as many scholars

have tried to do. Perhaps his dumbness was instrumental in the development of his art, but we have

no objective evidence to reach a final conclusion, a part of the only thing he has left us, his work,

which now appears at first glance certainly exceptional for more than one reason10.

Avercamp's work includes numerous paintings on wood and a few on copper, as well as an

impressive graphic work consisting of drawings, watercolors, pastels, in part preparatory works for

the oils, in part works in isolation11. The first characteristic we can notice is his painting is almost

exclusively focused on the winter landscape, with very few exceptions12. We said that this genre

was very popular among the painters of the period for reply to a specific request for the public

(months, seasons, allegories of life, vanitas) but it also reflects the strong psychological impact that

the Little Ice Age had above the same audience. At the same time, it is interesting to note no painter

had dedicated himself exclusively to this subject, intentionally leaving out the other seasons of the

year, before Avercamp. We do not know the reason for his preference, surely his talent in portraying

bleak winter landscapes without slipping into a cold sterile monochrome (like many of his

colleagues and successors will do) is a good starting point to grasp the importance, and together

extravagance, of his work. Without forgetting it is deeply rooted in the painting of his flemish

predecessors whose works certainly knew, a pupil of them in Amsterdam.

The close link between Avercamp and artists like Bol or Vinkboons can be easily detected by

comparing some of their works. Many of the landscapes of the two flemish painters, we know

through drawings and prints taken from the original (fig. 3), have a wide expanse of ice in the

foreground animated by numerous skaters, while in the background at the center stands a castle.

The topic was widespread, and we find it in some of the earliest panels of Avercamp like the Winter

9 Suchtelen 2001, pp.50-53.10 Bikker 2009 pp. 11-21.11 Schapelhouman 2009 pp. 85-117.12 Only two paintings of summer landscape are known, see Roelofs 2009, pp. 80-81, while there are several drawings

of this subject, see Schapelhouman 2009.

Landscape with a Castle in Bergen (1608), A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle (fig. 4) in

London (c. 1608) and Winter Landscape with a Castle on an Island in Cologne (c. 1605). In the

first two cited versions also noteworthy is the use of the same drawing for the castle, and the

presence in both panels of a tree in the foreground which bisects the composition, a process most

evident in the rectangular panel of Bergen, rather than in the round one of London. The same

approach, this time with a church in place of the castle, appears in the painting of Geneva Winter

Landscape with a Peat Boat (fig. 5, c. 1608)13. The similarities that we may be encountered,

especially with Bol, are evident and they are one of the predominant features of the first phase of

the Avercamp's painting.

An even more explicit inspiration could be reflected in the use of the theme of Bruegel's

bird-trap. It was copied and recopied countless times by many others painters. We can see it in the

painting at the Rijksmuseum, Winter Landscape with Skaters (fig 6, c. 1608), where the bird-trap

appears in the foreground as in Bruegel but much less evident14. Avercamp pays tribute to his

greatest predecessor, but the emphasis on the hardships of life during the winter does not seem to

interest him, and in fact, he prefers to reserve as much space as possible to the characters who enjoy

the ice and life, carefree. Perhaps it is no coincidence the Bruegel's trap was full of birds while here

it appears empty and useless.

Vibrancy and vitality are, actually, some of the most distinctive features in the works of

Avercamp. It does not seem to be any space in them for reflections on the transience of life, the

threats to the survival lurked in the cold, the most extreme characteristics of the winter season. No

snow or storm shake his landscapes or interrupt the gaiety of the skaters. No pompous baroque

cloud monumentalizes and glorifies his views (so typical of painters like Van Goyen, Van Ruysdael

or Beerstraten15). The light of the Mute of Kampen is always bright and diffused, without shadows

to which a mind more prone to dramatic reflections can clutch. A brilliant pale winter cloaks

entirely his work, making in a realistic manner the Dutch sparkling days in which the horizon

disappears in the background, sometimes marked only by a city skyline in the distance. To get this

impression of diffuse light and ice pale together, Avercamp uses a mixture of colours like blue,

yellow and pink, very diluted, by which he builds the overall atmosphere of the painting, always

homogeneous. He uses similar colours but more pronounced in the buildings in the scene, but rarely

creating strong tonal contrasts that could disturb the clear cold homogeneous background. In this

sense, another comparison with Bruegel is useful to understand the fundamental difference between

the southern tradition and the novelty of Avercamp's painting, his more realistic and modern view of

reality. In the Bruegel's landscapes everything is perfectly focused, even we can easily distinguish

13 Roelofs 2009, pp.38-43.14 Roelofs 2009, p.35.15 Suchtelen 2001, pp. 66-67, and cat. nr. 14, 22, 24.

the outlines of the more distant villages, everything is rendered with sharp saturated colours, which

do not take into account the growing distance between foreground and background16. Even the

landscape painters emigrated to the north, such as Hans Bol, adopted similar solutions. Avercamp,

however, not only takes into account the distance of vision, making things and people fade into the

horizon, but also envelops the scene in a sort of vaporous mist, as if everything was shrouded by the

ice dust raised by the skaters' fury, as we can see in the still cited paintings of Amsterdam and

London, or in the Winter Landscape of Vienna (c. 1605).

The crowd is another important feature in the work of Avercamp, hundreds of figures inhabit his

scenes, making them full of life and colours. The taste for the anecdote, sometimes rude, never fails,

and even if the themes are constantly repeated in all the paintings, we never get an impression of

monotony. Looking at the details of paintings and drawings can be seen easily repetitions, copies

without alterations, or reinterpretations of the same subjects, but also the close study of the models,

the miniature details. For the Mute of Kampen was important not to make his work closer to the

truth but more lively and carefree as possible. Each class has its space and his well-deserved fun,

the noble as the peasant, the fisherman as the gypsy17. The colours are stronger in the rendering of

the characters that animate the scene in the foreground, focusing the attention of the viewer

intrigued by this variety of poses and anecdotes. Colf players, skaters go arm in arm, others that slip

taking beating and ridiculous poses, big slides, splendidly attired ladies, children playing with the

snow, simple peasants who continue their daily work or take an amusing break from it.

The sense of unity of the work grows progressively as we enter the second and third decades

of the century. The compositions are simplified and the buildings, like instead of theatre wings for

the skaters' deeds, disappear. The patterns inherited from the Flemish painters gradually disappear

giving way to more orderly Dutch simple views, where the foreground is occupied only by the

characters, the landscape become more extensive for the lack of architectural wings. Sometimes the

detail with which the city, the ramparts and canals are described suggest real topographical views, a

kind of genre that in those years was prominently spreading, and to which Avercamp did not have to

be indifferent, as we can see in the Winter scenes Outside the walls of Kampen (fig. 7, c.1613-15),

kept in a Private collection, of which there is also a study with the detail of the city walls 18. The

scholars failed to recognize other similar cases in its panels, but there is no doubt that others details

taken from nature have been used in other paintings. With the attainment of full artistic maturity in

Avercamp the figures seem to get bigger, buy more physical and scenic presence, as well as

attention to detail. In reality this development can only be considered an impression due in part to

16 Bikker 2009, pp. 136-137.17 Mortier2009, pp. 141-163. 18 About the spreading of the topografical view see Leeflang 1998.

changes in the composition that we can detect in some later works19. In the Winter Landscape

(c.1620) in PCWM Dreesmann Collection of Brussels and the Colf Players on the Ice (fig. 10,

c.1625) in Houston, for example, Avercamp isolates in the foreground a single subject who gets the

role of protagonist while the crowd typical of other works almost completely disappears. In the

painting of Houston the point of view is lowered to the same level of characters, the colf players

precisely, suggesting that the viewer is on the ice too, part of the scene. In the Winter Landscape

with a hunter shooting duck in a private collection, the hunter kneeling in the foreground is the only

focal point of the scene and the result is truly original and surprisingly modern20. The scale of this

figures is certainly higher than usual but it is still an extraordinary unicum in the paintings of

Avercamp. In other works made in the same years as the Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal (fig. 8,

c.1620) in Los Angeles and Winter Landscape near a Town (fig. 9, c.1620) in Haarlem, Avercamp

fills the foreground with several characters putting more emphasis on them and more attention to

detail. But even this is not evidence of a real change of scale itself. The poses of the characters are

the same as proven in previous paintings and only the fact that they are assembled in the foreground

can give the impression of increased scale. Maybe we have to think to a reason external to the

painting, an experiment of the painter or a whim of the customer, rather than a pictorial evolution of

Avercamp.

The Mute of Kampen spent most of his life in the city of Overijssel where he grew up and

where he died, possibly due to an illness, in 1634. He dedicated his work almost entirely to the

representation of winter and entertainment that one's could draw from the vast ice surfaces that the

harsh winters of the Little Ice Age had made familiar to the people of northern Europe. Hendrick

Avercamp developed the northern netherlands winter landscape as a genre in its own right. Starting

from the example of Bruegel and Flemish painters who acted as masters in Amsterdam, he was able

to create original typically Dutch works, portraying contemporary society, in all its meanings, and

the landscape of his homeland, whose main feature is the resource of the water in its channels. From

this point of view Avercamp can not be considered otherwise than one of the greatest and most

important master of the Dutch landscape. Many other artists imitated and copied its works, like his

nephew Barent Avercamp, other artists, like Van Goyen and Van Ruisdael, realized winter

landscapes independently from the example of the painter of Kampen21, but none of them are

specialized as Avercamp, whose work appears to be the most perfect bright and vivid vision of a

Dutch icy winter.

19 Roelofs, p.51, 63.20 The painting is currently in the online catalogs of Sotheby's where it was auctioned in 2009,

http://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/WINTER-LANDSCAPE-WITH-A-HUNTER-SHOOTING-/D2CF4D9DB9D69936 controlled on the 16 december 2011.

21 Suchtelen pp.54-70.

Illustrations

Fig. 1 Pieter Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow, 1565, oil on panel, 117x162 cm, Kunsthistorisches

Museum, Vienna.

Fig. 2 Pieter Bruegel, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird-trap, 1565, oil on panel, 37x55.5

cm, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

Fig. 3 Pieter van der Heijden, after Hans Bol, Winter, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen,

Rotterdam.

Fig. 4 Hendrick Avercamp, A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle, c.1608, oil on panel, diam.

40,7 cm, The National Gallery, London.

Fig. 5 Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape with a Peat Boat, c. 1608, oil on panel, 47x73 cm,

Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.

Fig. 6 Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape with Skaters, c. 1608, oil on panel, 87,3x131,9 cm,

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 7 Hendrick Avercamp, Winter scenes Outside the walls of Kampen, c.1613-15, oil on panel,

44,5x72,5 cm, Private collection.

Fig. 8 Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal, c. 1620, oil on panel, 36,8x65,4 cm,

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mrs Edward W. Carter Collection, Los Angeles.

Fig. 9 Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape near a Town, c.1620, oil on panel, 47x89 cm, Frans

Hals Museum, on loan from a private collection, Haarlem.

Fig. 10 Hendrick Avercamp, Colf Players in the Ice, c.1625, oil on panel, 28,6x51,3 cm, The

Museum of Fine Arts, Edward and Sally Speelman Collection, Houston.

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