Women’s Skating Competition on the Stadsgracht in Leeuwarden, 21 January 1809

Nicolaas Baur created the oil-on-canvas painting Women’s Skating Competition on the Stadsgracht in Leeuwarden, 21 January 1809 in 1809. The work depicts a specific historical event involving short-track ice skating on the Stadsgracht in Leeuwarden, with the Oldehove tower visible in the background. While the title specifies the date of the event as January 21, 1809, the inception of the artwork itself is recorded as January 1, 1809.

The painting measures 59.7 cm in height and 74.9 cm in width. It is currently held in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, having been processed through the Munich Central Collecting Point.

The painting is held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. According to its institutional record, the work also passed through the Munich Central Collecting Point, a post-war recovery facility for displaced art.

No specific inventory or accession number, and no exhibition history, is documented in the available sources.

Nicolaas Baur’s 1809 oil painting records a winter gathering on Leeuwarden’s Stadsgracht. The canvas captures a group of women gliding hand‑in‑hand across the frozen canal, framed by the town’s architecture and a crowd of onlookers. The work is part of the Rijksmuseum’s collection and offers a vivid snapshot of early‑19th‑century Dutch leisure.

The early 1800s saw a rise in recreational ice skating across the Netherlands, often organized as short‑track races known as kortebaanschaatsen. Baur’s depiction aligns with contemporary interest in everyday life scenes, situating the competition within the broader cultural practice of winter festivities in Friesland.