In these days (15th February 2010) in Amsterdam the exhibition “Ijspret” [“fun on the ice”] is coming to an end. The show [exhib. catalogue by Pieter Roelofs] is dedicated to Hendrick Avercamp (Amsterdam, 1585 - Kampen, 1634), the artist who grounded the genre of winter landscapes, which will have success as a self-standing genre in the 17th century.
After his training in the Flanders, Avercamp like many other artists at his time, moved to Amsterdam, the capital city of Holland, for commerce and for the culture, where he could find for sure more commissions. From the experience in the Flanders he drew the blueish fairy-tale castles which guide the observer's eye towards the background of the painting. It was a technical device already in use in the Flemish region that to use warmer colors in the foreground, and then towards the background artists used at first greenish and then blueish colors to accentuate the perceived distance of the landscape. It becomes easy to compare Avercamp with Pieter Brueghel (Bruxelles, 1568 – Anversa, 1625), because both used to transfer on the panel tiny characters attending at their daily activities. Almost like caricatures of period, characters by Avercamp, who was known as “de Stomme van Kampen” (the mute of Kampen), are by contrast rowdy and messy but perfectly embedded as precious stones in the frozen landscape.
During the seventeenth century, between 1645 and about 1715, there was an extraordinary weather event that involved Europe and thus also the Netherlands. That period was so cold that historians buckled the nickname of "Little Ice Age”. The twenty-five drawings and the twenty paintings by Avercamp on display, have been collected for the first time on this occasion and come from international museums and private collections: the majority of the drawings, however, comes from the collection of Queen Elizabeth II of England, a great admirer and collector of this artist.
It is therefore the biting cold that is felt as the very first sensation by watching the characters represented, literally swathed from head to toe, in the interplay of paintings and drawings, arranged in two adjoining rooms on the first floor of the Rijksmuseum.
If the critics have always wanted to see in the Dutch seventeenth century paintings a glimpse of reality, then, in the paintings by Avercamp, as in the drawings, the observer is hopelessly immersed in cold atmosphere, on days when the sun rises for sure, but then remains well hidden behind the clouds, giving the sky a color ranging from shades of gray to a pale rose. The concentration is all directed to the figurines, tiny but highly detailed that are throw in an eternal skating on frozen canals, which, at least for those winters, enable connection between the seven provinces with the help of sledges and no more with slow boats because of the frozen canals.
And Avercamp then show us a village not slowed down by the stiffness of the climate but in full swing as the baker, the hunter, the children playing or the walking of the bourgeois. After having the skate fasted - a sole with blade, fitted with strings to ensure the shoes - after priming with every tool useful to their work in the sledge, after having tied the horses, the people of Holland is so ready to ride on ice until sunset.
The paintings point of view is always slightly high, so as to suggest that the artist looks down from a window to capture for example the woman dressed in Parisian style, famous icon, with her hair tied over her head, the strange fan-shaped collar on her back [the collar looks like the wheel-shaped tail of a peacock], with also a little black mask recalling of the character of Colombina in the Italian Commedia dell'Arte.
In the drawings the point of view moves down: the artist, to capture every detail, sits on a chair beside the frozen canal, or simply on the stool in his studio: the same lady with mask had been previously sketched on a sheet, with just an hint of color, completed at the end in the painting.
Funny events alternating with sad ones. The observer can notice ladies that due to little attention or to the much confidence in their abilities of skaters, fall miserably with their legs in the air, leaving very little to the imagination, as well as other details, almost hidden by the fog into the background, where bodies were hanging from the gallows, hanged indiscriminately on the right or on the left of the horizon. But still, the most important thing was to have them hidden away from the sight of the bourgeois.
If we look just at paintings we would say that the artist has represented several snapshots, postcards of an icy landscape, but this exhibition gives an opportunity to observe both the finished painting that his conception: Avercamp panels are in fact a sort of collages of images previously retailed. As already mentioned for the Dutch Colombina, the hunter of ducks, which in the design is first sketched with lighter lines and then finished with more decision, as he stands with both hands resting on the barrel of the enormous rifle, with a duck hung on the belt that encircles his hips, will certainly be hiding under the porch of an inn, or next to a group of other hunters who are resting after the hunt.
Paintings characterized by a very distant horizon where the vegetation and the houses in the distance are colored in blue and the sky crossed by black crows is colored in pink, almost red transforming the scene from morning to evening in an instant, as if the painter wanted to capture under one same sky the entirety of day of the Little Ice Age.
The exhibition will appear again at the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 21 March to 5 July 2010.
__________________________________________________________
Website: http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/pers/tentoonstellingen/avercamp-ijspret?lang=it
No related media.