1618
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Two Gentlemen (verso) is a 1618 by Hendrick Avercamp, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see two men in dark cloaks standing on a frozen canal, watching people skate and work. Avercamp was deaf and mute, so he paid extra attention to small gestures—like the child wiping tears while her mother does laundry in a hole cut through the ice. The scene feels busy but quiet, as if everyone is wrapped in their own winter world. If you like these frozen Dutch crowds, look up Hendrick Avercamp (Netherlandish, 1585–1634) for more of his winter scenes.
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.
See the richer artist page
