Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters

A frozen river teems with life under a flat winter sky: hundreds of tiny figures skate, push sledges, play kolf, tumble on the ice, and crowd the banks of a Dutch town. Hendrick Avercamp, deaf and mute and known as 'the mute of Kampen,' specialized in these panoramic winter scenes, observing the whole social world - rich and poor, young and old - out on the same ice. Now in the Rijksmuseum, it is among the earliest pure landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age, a bird's-eye comedy of an entire community at play.