Artist: Aert Van Der Neer
Date: 1660
Size: 52 x 67 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
The composition of this painting is typical of Aert van der Neer’s winter scenes. There is a strip of land in the foreground, a frozen waterway behind it, a town on the left and countryside on the right. Several pairs are playing kolf, both on the land and on the ice, there are figures with sledges and others are skating in the background. The artist gives the impression that it is a raw winter’s day. Coat tails are flapping in the wind, the kolf players are wearing gloves, and some of the figures have stuffed their hands into their pockets or have huddled up inside their cloaks. That people in spite of the cold are occupied with kolf shows just how popular the game was in the seventeenth century. As in his earlier Winter Landscape near a Town with Kolf Players and Horse-Drawn Sleighs,8 the men are taking their activity fairly seriously; it is obviously not an occasion for high spirits or jollity. Chronologically this work has to be placed after the better-known Winter Landscape near a Town with Kolf Players and Horse-Drawn Sleighs of around 1650-55. This is suggested by the larger scale of the figures and the fact that the design is a little less traditional. Van der Neer had the courage to omit the trees that usually frame his earlier scenes. His only dated picture from after 1653 has a similarly open composition,9 but the far coarser manner of that 1662 landscape shows that it was executed later than the one in the Rijksmuseum. The few paintings that are directly comparable include one in Braunschweig that can be assigned to the end of the 1650s, and which has a similar church and colourful sky.10 Stylistic comparison is complicated by the lack of dated works from this period. The dress of the kolf player in the centre foreground is a better indicator to establish a chronology. He is wearing short petticoat breeches with a fashionably knotted cravat and boothose below the knee. These wide, bell-like tops of the stockings repeat the shape of the breeches. The latter, being the most important part of the costume,11 only caught on in the Dutch Republic around 1658, so it would be safe to place this Winter Landscape near a Town with Kolf Players between circa 1658 and 1660.12 Erlend de Groot, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
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