A winter landscape with skaters

Included by Clara Welcker in her seminal monograph on the artist as an attributed work, this picture of 'Pleasure on the Ice' can now be considered a very early studio work of great proximity to Hendrick Avercamp, datable to circa 1615. The early dating of the picture is significant; the latest studies on the artist, coinciding with the 2009 monographic exhibition (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, and Washington, National Gallery), have suggested that Avercamp developed a studio practice only from circa 1620 onwards. 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.