A winter landscape with skaters on a frozen river, a windmill and other buildings beyond

Until very recently, the present work has held a secure place within the painted oeuvre of Hendrick Avercamp. It was included by Clara Welcker in her seminal monograph on the artist and was published as recently as 1982 by Professor Albert Blankert, who still supports a full attribution. However, the latest studies into this artist, that coincided with the 2009 monographic exhibition (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, and Washington, National Gallery), have suggested that from around 1620 onwards, Avercamp started to produce a number of paintings lacking the refinement, clarity of detail and chilled atmosphere of his early work, which appears to indicate that he developed a studio practice around this time. The lack of documents and the paucity of dated works make any attempt to trace Avercamp's artistic development highly speculative, but it is certainly now indeed reasonable to dispel the myth that Hendrick Avercamp worked in isolation without some form of assistance. The continuous use and re-use of motifs, compositions and landscape settings, as well as the variation in style and quality of the staffage used in the paintings attributed to the master, seem to strongly support this notion and make it seem likely that a bountiful supply of drawings by Avercamp provided a set of stock motifs for his assistants. In this respect, several of the figures in the present picture can be seen to recur in other paintings by Hendrick Avercamp. For example, the boy blowing into his hands relates closely to a figure in the picture in The Harold Samuel Collection, (Corporation of London), and the couple in the centre foreground can also be found in a painting in a private collection (see P. Roelofs, op.cit., fig. 53).