Hendrick Avercamp: Chronicler of the Little Ice Age

Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634) is best known as the Dutch master of the ice scene—which he’d probably be relieved to hear, because he seldom painted anything else. Despite his monomania for winter, far broader themes gather within Avercamp’s frames. His paintings offer a rose-tinted window into a pivotal point in the history of the Netherlands—and the people, climate and politics that shaped it.

Looking South for Inspiration

Hendrick Avercamp was born in Amsterdam in 1585, less than 20 years after the start of the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish empire. He would die before Spain recognized the republic’s independence in 1648.

The majority of Avercamp’s life was spent in Kampen, but he returned to his hometown to train with Danish history painter Pieter Isaacz until around 1607. He appears to have learned more from his master’s neighbors than from Isaacz himself: both Gillis van Coninxloo and David Vinckboons had studios nearby, and Avercamp’s earliest-known pieces suggest that at least one of them took Avercamp under their wing.

Vinckboons and Coninxloo had both moved to the Dutch Republic to escape the Spanish Netherlands, bringing the Flemish influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder north of the border with them. Avercamp was almost certainly trained by one of the pair, and likely came across Bruegel’s work in Coninxloo’s studio.

Bruegel’s canvases prioritized natural scenery and peasant life over religious subject-matter, seeding the ground for the genre and landscape works that would come to define Dutch Golden Age painting. The young republic was broadly Calvinist, and rejected religious imagery—but an emerging merchant class had money to spend on works that eulogized their day-to-day life. For Avercamp, that meant depicting his country’s increasingly-cold winters was fair game.

Painting in the Little Ice Age

The sudden popularity of ice scenes in the 16th and 17th century Netherlands was not a coincidence. Aside from the Netherlands’ acceptance of landscape and genre paintings as legitimate artistic pursuits, Europeans were living through one of the coldest periods in recorded history.

The “Little Ice Age” lasted for several hundred years, but some of its most severe winters hit northern Europe just as the Dutch Republic was taking shape. In 1565—the same year Bruegel painted The Hunters in the Snow—an iceberg crashed into the Dutch town of Delfshaven. While Hendrick Avercamp was working on Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, London’s “Great Frost” of 1608 led to ice festivals on the frozen Thames.

Bruegel wasn’t the first to paint a winter scene, but he was one of the most influential. A detail shared between Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap and Avercamp’s first dated work hints at the inspiration that may have reached the young Dutch artist via Coninxloo or Vinckboons.

Whether the bird trap in Hendrick Avercamp’s painting is a direct reference or not, Bruegel had established a visual language for winter landscapes that Avercamp would make his own. The same misty, atmospheric perspective that Bruegel used to suggest distance also typifies Avercamp’s work, as do the skaters and merry-makers. In Avercamp’s paintings, though, the identities of those figures would diversify.

The Great Leveller

For an artist that was likely deaf and mute, Hendrick Avercamp painted scenes that teem with chatter. True to his Flemish influences, he filled his winterscapes with characters engaged in activities from the athletic to the scatological. In paintings like A Scene on the Ice Near a Town, an embarrassment of ice skaters, laborers, merchants, carriage riders, dogs, and horses tumble, lounge, and lope their way through the frigid scenery.

Unlike the relatively homogenous figures in Flemish scenes, though, the characters themselves are as socially diverse as their pastimes and chores. Wealthy burghers ride carriages past roughly-shod figures braced against the cold, while members of the Netherlands’ expanding middle class lace their skates.

In Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings, figures across the spectrum of 17th-century society share the ice. The frozen canals and rivers are an apt setting for a diorama of Dutch social classes, with the country’s long history of reclaiming land from water now extended to their public spaces. Art historians like Michael Glover have described Avercamp’s ice as a “great leveller”—rich and poor live, work, and play with equal claim to public space.

Aside from the Twelve Years’ Truce that began in 1609, the Netherlands was at war through Avercamp’s entire life, and frigid winters exacerbated poverty. Avercamp’s rosy vision of life in the new republic wasn’t entirely fabricated, though—in Simon Schama’s words: “An Avercamp winterscape with gentlefolk skating alongside rustics and sober burghers is an idyll, no doubt, but not so very far from the truth.”

Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings are reflective of the relatively high standard of living and social intermingling that many citizens of the Dutch Republic enjoyed. While there was a wealthy and powerful merchant class (profiting in part from a growing slave trade), farmers and workers made more money than their counterparts in neighboring countries, and upward mobility was possible.

The first large-scale middle class in history emerged in the Netherlands during this period—one with the buying power and inclination to seek out works by the likes of Avercamp. As English diarist John Evelyn remarked on a visit to the Dutch Republic: “Pictures are very common here, there being scarce an ordinary tradesman whose house is not decorated with them.”

As a newly-minted nation looking to separate itself from the Spanish empire, the Dutch Republic was not short on patriotism and civic pride. Here again, Avercamp’s painted encyclopedias leave us clues. As his career progressed—and the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce approached—Dutch flags began to sprout across his oeuvre. Gallows, too, appear in several works. Art historian Rebecca Albiani interprets distant gibbets not as morbid mementos mori, but as a mark of pride in the republic’s decentralized judicial system.

A New Republic Takes Shape

Like many landscape and genre works of the era, Avercamp’s ice scenes rarely depict specific people, places, or moments in time. Instead, they are a collage of figures he sketched from life and frequently reused in different paintings. With some notable exceptions depicting towns like Kampen and Antwerp, much of his action takes place near unidentifiable settlements, as much a stand-in for a “type” as his figures.

Anonymity does not prevent Avercamp’s figures from embodying a very specific moment in history. His paintings illustrate vital socio-political currents in the development of a new relationship between social classes, and a new nation. Avercamp was an omnivorous observer with a keen sense of humour, and his ice scenes offer modern viewers a window into the young Dutch Republic—or what it hoped to be.

In Ice Scene with Kolf Players, a man dressed in an iridescent tunic prepares to tee off with an iron-headed club. He has an audience: to the right, fellow players watch with practiced eyes. To the left—and just as prominent in Avercamp’s visual hierarchy—a man and child watch him take aim. They have taken a break from hacking a fishing hole in the ice, still holding the axe and net that will help them survive the winter. With enough luck, the young boy could one day trade his net for a kolf club.

For now, though, he stakes his claim to Avercamp’s foreground alongside his wealthier compatriots. On the frozen river, they are on an even—if slippery—footing.

Author’s bio

Alex Cohen is a UK-based freelance writer. He has an MLitt in the History of Art from the University of St Andrews.