Winter Landscape near a Town with Kolf Players and Horse-Drawn Sleighs, Aert van der Neer, c. 1650 - c. 1655 – (Aert Van Der Neer) ◄ Önceki Sonraki ►

Sanatçı: Aert Van Der Neer

Tarih: 1655

Boyut: 63 x 78 cm

teknik: Oil On Canvas

This ambitious winter scene is regarded as one of Aert van der Neer’s most distinctive and successful paintings in the genre.11 Numerous figures are entertaining themselves with all sorts of amusements on a broad frozen stretch of water outside a town. The direction of view is diagonally into the distance from the left foreground to the right background, and is accentuated by the simple sleigh with peasants on the left, and by the spiked pole resting on the eel basket.12 The latter object has an iconographic counterpart in the fisherman on the right who is spearing eels through a hole in the ice under the gaze of some bystanders. Next to this group several people are playing kolf.13 The man left of centre is waiting until a skater gets out of the way before hitting the ball. There are more kolf players and skaters in the middle ground. One has a hook on his back so that he can pull himself out if he falls through the ice. A de luxe horse-drawn sleigh preceded by a dog is heading for a side arm of the frozen water on the right. As in other compositions by Van der Neer there is a town with several church spires on the left, and a stretch of countryside with a windmill and scattered farmhouses on the right. Compared to contemporaries like Jan van de Cappelle and Salomon van Ruysdael, Van der Neer does not present an intimate, small-scale picture of diversions on the ice but follows the more traditional route with compositions in which the viewer gazes over a large sheet of frozen water populated with relatively small figures engaged in a wide range of activities.14 Van der Neer’s work is therefore likened to that of his great predecessor Hendrick Avercamp.15 In this painting, though, there are none of the latter’s typically humorous narrative details, like skaters who have fallen flat on their faces or through the ice. Van der Neer focused less on detail and more on the scene as a whole, to which he gave a strong unity of tone with a restrained, subtle application of colour. The figures and objects in the foreground are brightly lit and stand out sharply against the middle and backgrounds, where a hazy, wintry sun is just breaking through the clouds. The further off they are the more the town and icy surface dissolve in a warm glow. The great attention paid to the cloudy sky, the clearly framed composition and the use of aerial perspective are typical of Van der Neer’s oeuvre. Other distinctive characteristics are the strikingly draughtsman-like handling of the figures and objects, and the lines scratched into the wet paint with the handle of the brush or a similar implement, as in the blanket on the horse on the right and in the straw on the peasants’ sleigh. Van der Neer’s winter scenes are never of recognizable locations, and this one, too, is very clearly imaginary. One of the devices that he invariably used was a strip of land in the foreground, and although it does contribute to the unity and balance of the composition it does imply that the stretch of ice is always bounded on three sides by town, countryside and reed fringes, meaning that the water was not a free-flowing stream, nor a canal running along the city walls. Winter Landscape near a Town with Kolf Players and Horse-Drawn Sleighs is generally placed around 1655.16 Although it is considerably more complex and ambitious than Van der Neer’s earliest dated winter scenes, which are from the 1640s, the assignment to the mid-1650s seems to have been dictated largely by the unproven hypothesis that that was his most successful and productive period. However, the composition, which is still fairly traditional, consisting as it does of a general view with smallish figures, would seem to point to a relatively early origin, and that also applies to the framing device of a small group of tall bare trees on the right. The detailing, though, betrays the hand of a mature artist. A date in the early 1650s could be proposed on the evidence of the dress of the foreground group of kolf players. The broad collars draped over the shoulders of the three elegantly clad gentlemen came into fashion around then.17 The long, wavy hair and the breeches with long open legs are also typical of that time,18 so it seems plausible that Van der Neer painted the scene between 1650 and 1655. Erlend de Groot, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements