Cleveland Museum of Art

A Woman Doing Laundry in an Ice Hole (recto); Two Gentlemen (verso)

Hendrick Avercamp

Date

c. 1618

Medium

black and red chalk, graphite, watercolor, pen and black ink, black and red chalk, graphite, watercolor (verso) on blue paper

Culture

Netherlands

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp became widely known for his near-exclusive production of winter landscapes, often featuring large crowds made up of different social classes congregated on the Netherlands’ iced canals and rivers and engaged in various activities from ice skating and socializing to doing laundry, fishing, and hauling goods. In this drawing, he sketched a woman squatting to do laundry at a hole in the ice, accompanied by a child who wipes tears from her eyes. On the verso (back) of the same sheet, two men in elegant, middle-class attire appear to be socializing. The artist kept such sheets in his workshop for reference in his larger, multi-figured, finished compositions. Though incomplete due to the cut of the sheet, the gestures of the men on the back of this drawing suggest they could be engaged in a game of kolf, a ball and paddle game played on the ice that appears frequently in the artist’s winter scenes.

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