Object data
oil on panel
support: height 47.5 cm × width 91 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Adam van Breen
Landscape with Frozen Canal, Skaters and an Ice-Boat
1611
Inscriptions
- signature and date, on the flag of the ice-boat on the left: A.v.Breen. 1611.
Technical notes
The support is a single horizontally grained oak panel that has been planed down and cradled. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1577. The panel could have been ready for use by 1586, but a date in or after 1596 is more likely. There is an off-white ground with a grey imprimatura. The painting was executed from the back to the front, without reserves.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 16 January 2005
Condition
Fair. There is a great deal of abrasion and overpainting in the sky. The varnish is very discoloured.
Conservation
- H.H. Mertens, 1969: retouched
Provenance
...; sale, Henry North, Earl of Sheffield (†) et al. [anonymous section], London (Christie’s), 11 December 1909, no. 134, £ 89 5s, to the dealer J. Glen, London; from whom, fl. 1,210, to the museum, 1910
Object number: SK-A-2510
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Adam van Breen (? Amsterdam c. 1585 - ? Kristiania in or after 1642)
Adam van Breen was probably born in Amsterdam around 1585. Nothing is known about his training with certainty, but it is thought that he was a pupil of Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634) or David Vinckboons (1576-1630/33), or both. On 13 February 1612 he gave notice of his intended marriage to the widow Maria Gelle in The Hague, on which occasion he was registered as ‘bachelor from Amsterdam’. He joined the Guild of St Luke in The Hague in 1612 or 1614. On 28 June 1617 he received 100 pounds from the States-General for his designs for the 62 engravings in Die Nassausche Wapenhandelinge, which he published in The Hague in 1618 as a supplement to Jacques de Gheyn’s Wapenhandelinghe of 1608. He must have left The Hague in 1621 and moved to Amsterdam, where he was declared bankrupt in March 1622. From 1624 he was active in Kristiania (now Oslo), where he painted 25 paintings for the decoration of Akershus Castle, which had been commissioned by Christopher Urne. He returned to Amsterdam in 1628, where he presented a bankruptcy petition, but was back in Norway in 1636, where he is recorded in 1636, 1639 and 1640 in connection with decorations for castle Akershus, which had burned down for the second time in 1632. From his Norway period there is a painting of a Piece of Silver Ore signed and dated 1632, and a Portrait of Ole Bose, Bishop of Akershus dated 1642, attributed to the artist. In his Hague period he painted winter landscapes and genre scenes. His winter landscapes are similar to the early paintings of Hendrick Avercamp, and he was also influenced by David Vinckboons.
Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007
References
Moes and Aubert in Thieme/Becker IV, 1910, pp. 564-65; De Kinkelder in Saur XIV, 1996, pp. 64-65; Dumas in coll. cat. The Hague 1991b, p. 131; De Kinkelder in The Hague 1998, pp. 104-08
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.
Literature
Van Gelder/Van Gelder-Schrijver 1932, pp. 111, 114, no. 2; Van Thienen 1969, p. 486; Sutton in Amsterdam etc. 1987, pp. 510-11, no. 11
Collection catalogues
1912, p. 348, no. 619A; 1918, p. 63, no. 619a; 1934, p. 61, no. 619a; 1960, p. 57, no. 619 A1; 1976, p. 143, no. A 2510; 1992, p. 45, no. A 2510 (as copy after David Vinckboons); 2007, no. 31
Citation
J.P. Filedt Kok, 2007, 'Adam van Breen, Landscape with Frozen Canal, Skaters and an Ice-Boat, 1611', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6235
(accessed 24 November 2024 09:03:27).