The visual delight of Avercamp’s ‘Little Ice Age’

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Hendrick Avercamp: Master of the Ice Scene

Pieter Roeloffs (editor)

Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) was a specialist, like most artists of the Dutch Golden Age.  He was truly ‘master of the ice scene’, which he derived from several formative works by the more famous Pieter Bruegel the Elder (d. 1569).  All his images, paintings and drawings alike, present crowds of skaters, dressed in fabulous, often colourful costumes, silhouetted out on the open ice, which is in turn bounded by village houses, windmills, and a few larger civic buildings in the hazy distance.  This catalogue is the first dedicated study to his oeuvre.

Known in his own day as ‘the mute of Kampen’, Avercamp worked far from the major art centres, though he had contacts with Amsterdam, and he left very little biographical documentation.  Indeed, he was largely unrecorded for centuries, despite the popularity and familiarity of his paintings.  Thus this catalogue, product of an exhibition held in 2009 and shared between Amsterdam and Washington, ends up largely as a survey of his imagery in both paintings and drawings.  Its attraction for general readers will consist largely of its generous colour illustrations of every work and its handsome details, particularly of those costumed figures.

If there is a disappointment in this volume, it lies chiefly in the charm of such imagery, whose longer history surely would have been welcome.  Avercamp’s work stands as an early node in a chain of connected ice scenes in Dutch painting, and more on Bruegel’s models as well as later practitioners of the genre, including landscape painters who bestow less attention on skaters (Ruisdael, and Aert van der Neer come readily to mind; even a small Rembrandt winter scene in Cassel) could have made this volume more widely useful, even for specialists.  But this handsome volume will repay a look by any and all who are interested, and it will remain the standard work on Avercamp.

Most museum catalogues are not intended for the general public.  In today’s world of exhibitions, if an institution wants to reach the general public, it produces a fold-up gallery guide, writes introductory wall labels, and uses an audio tour.  So it comes as little surprise that a single-artist exhibition, dedicated to an unfamiliar name, should be accompanied by a catalogue directed primarily at specialists.  In this case, however, the ‘academic’ red icon at the top of this review should be qualified: as a source of visual delight, this book is for all ages and levels of interest.

The essays are somewhat predictable and driven by the concerns of a monograph.  Its main contributors are specialists: Pieter Roelofs is curator of 17th-century Dutch paintings at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the chief repository of that patrimony; Marijn Schapelhouman is senior curator of drawings in the same institution.  The other contributors also work in the Rijksmuseum as curators: Jonthan Bikker (‘early owners;); Arie Wallert and restorer Ige Verslype (‘technical aspects’); Bianca du Mortier (‘aspects of costume’).  The lone exception is Adriaan de Kraker, specialist in historical geography, who contributed an essay on the ‘Little Ice Age’, which surely conditioned both the climate during Avercamp’s lifetime and the ice-dependent activities of his paintings.

Hendrick Avercamp: Master of the Ice Scene by Pieter Roeloffs, Ed. is published by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and Yale University Press 2009. 192 pp. 250 col illus. ISBN 978 90 8689 059 0 (pbk)