Landscape with Frozen Canal, Skaters and an Ice-Boat

Entry

The foreground of this ice scene is dominated by an ice-boat with elegantly clad passengers and a Dutch flag on the afterdeck. A print by Christoffel van Sichem shows a similar kind of vessel, a ‘schuyt die op ijsers staet’ (‘boat standing on runners’).¹ The text under the print states that Prince Maurits had already gone for a ride in one in 1610. This was a new invention along the lines of the ‘land-yacht’.² It is not surprising that ice-boats were so popular in the bitterly cold winters of 1610 and 1611, for it froze for three months on end, and the ice must have been very thick.³ Those winters must also have contributed to the success of painted ice scenes.

This work is based on a considerably better one⁴ formerly attributed to Adriaen van de Venne⁵ and more recently to David Vinckboons,⁶ which was evidently very popular, judging by the number of copies made after it.⁷

The Rijksmuseum painting differs in many details from the prototype by Vinckboons, and must have been made shortly after it. Van Breen retained the key motifs of the ice-boat on the left, the elegantly dressed figures in the foreground and the castle on the right, but he omitted the farmhouse on the left, considerably curtailed the number of figures in the middleground, placed his horizon lower down, reducing the sense of depth, and eliminated the ice-boat in the background. The figures are more slender and less linear, as they are in Van Breen’s other paintings. Another work by him, signed and dated 1611, is an Ice Scene with Windmill and Icebound Boat in a private collection.⁸ That painting has similar figures and attributes, and the same city (possibly Haarlem) in the blue distance. With their lowered horizons, these paintings of 1611 represent a subsequent stage in the line of development from the Vinckboons version and Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skaters (SK-A-1718) in the Rijksmuseum. One striking detail in this painting is the oversized horse’s skull and the bones in the right foreground, where Vinckboons had a barrel with a small skull. The skull can be seen as a vanitas symbol alluding to life’s fragility, and it also stands for winter in general, the time when animals were slaughtered. Transience (the ‘slipperiness’ of life) is a subject that was frequently associated with ice and skating in emblem books and prints.⁹ The fashionably dressed onlookers in the foreground, who are a literal borrowing from Vinckboons, can also be seen as vanitas motifs, with their plumed hats and extravagant costumes. Primarily, though, they illustrate the modish fashions of the day, as they do in Van Breen’s painting of Prince Maurits (SK-A-955) and in Avercamp’s ice scenes.¹⁰

Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 31.