A Woman Doing Laundry in an Ice Hole (recto)

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

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.