1618
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
A Woman Doing Laundry in an Ice Hole (recto); Two Gentlemen (verso) is a 1618 by Hendrick Avercamp, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A woman kneels on ice, scrubbing clothes in a frozen river. A child stands beside her, wiping tears from cold cheeks. On the back, two men in fancy hats chat. Avercamp drew winter scenes like this to show how Dutch life carried on, even in freezing weather. The laundry hole was real—people cut them to wash clothes when rivers froze. The child’s tears might be from wind, or maybe from sadness. For more scenes of daily life on ice, look up the subject netherlands.
Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp became widely known for his near-exclusive production of winter landscapes, often featuring large crowds made up of different social classes congregated on the Netherlands’ iced canals and rivers and engaged in various activities from ice skating and socializing to doing laundry, fishing, and hauling goods. In this drawing, he sketched a woman squatting to do laundry at a hole in the ice, accompanied by a child who wipes tears from her eyes. On the verso (back) of the same sheet, two men in elegant, middle-class attire appear to be…
Though incomplete due to the cut of the sheet, the gestures of the men on the back of this drawing suggest they could be engaged in a game of kolf, a ball and paddle game played on the ice that appears frequently in the artist’s winter scenes.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Hendrick Avercamp (January 27, 1585 (bapt.) – May 15, 1634 (buried)) was a Dutch painter during the Dutch Golden Age of painting.
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