Getty Museum
A Winter Scene with Two Gentlemen Playing Colf
Creator
Hendrick AvercampDutch Artist · 1585–1634
All works by this person →The year after his birth, Hendrik Avercamp's family moved to Kampen, where the artist spent most of his life. Avercamp was a deaf-mute from birth, and was commonly known by his nickname, "de Stomme" or "de Stom," translated as "the mute" in Dutch. It is generally assumed that he was a pupil of the history and portrait painter Pieter Isaacks, in whose house in Amsterdam he is thought to have lived
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1615–1620
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink and translucent and opaque watercolor
- Culture
- Dutch
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Under a pale grey winter sky, a variety of figures enjoy ice skating, sledging and conversing. In the foreground, two men play colf, a traditional Dutch sport that is a cross between golf and ice hockey. Hendrik Avercamp, was the first Dutch artist to elevate watercolor and gouache drawings to the status of paintings. His skill is visible here in details like the fine pen and ink lines describing the figures, or the delicate gouache coloring suggesting shadows on the ice. His typical monogram is visible in the lower left (the letter *H* enclosing the letter *A* ), indicating he saw this as a finished work, not a study. Avercamp was a prolific draftsman, and helped popularize such landscapes with seventeenth-century Dutch collectors. His contemporaries would have appreciated this winter scene on multiple levels. The skaters, some of whom have fallen on the ice, would have suggested the notion of *de slibberachtigheyt van's menschen leven* or "the slipperiness of human life," to remind viewers of life's brevity.
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