How, then, do we classify the vast icescape in the foreground of this work? It would be impossible for travelers to distinguish the space from the middle of the ocean. Therefore, the town squaremight be considered a place, nestled within the city in the far distance of Avercamp’s A Scene on the Ice, dated circa 1610. Place, she explains, is a “meaningful location,” a space invested with emotional attachment, whereas space is “raw material” that cultural or social processes have not yet transformed. Louisa Mackenzie considers the importance of such spatial classifications in early modern minds. In addition to referencing hardships of the local environment, early seventeenth-century images of winter also call attention to the ways that the weather complicated contemporary conceptualizations of space and place. They may have also been valued as a novel image type or for the ways that they depicted an environment that viewers prided as distinctively Dutch. Perhaps such pictures appealed to contemporary viewers for their representations of the communal hardship and cultural resilience that they subtly referenced. There are few, if any, existing seventeenth-century documents that explicitly discuss their cultural significance, and few of the original owners of Avercamp’s paintings or drawings are known. It is difficult to know precisely why these works held so much popular appeal. Produced primarily for the open market, they were purchased by a socio-economic cross-section of the population. Not far to her right, a man bears a load of sticks on his back, a reminder of the difficulty of obtaining firewood in snow-covered terrain.Īvercamp and his contemporaries’ images of winter were enormously popular in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. On the left-hand side, a woman washing her clothes in a small hole in the ice demonstrates one of the hardships that the season’s lack of water presented. Many of the narrative details in Avercamp’s Ice Scene, dated circa 1610, reference serious challenges that the Little Ice Age posed to Northern Europe’s inhabitants. The frigid weather, however, was not without consequences. The hub of a maritime trade empire, the Dutch Republic relied primarily on wind rather than solar energy to power its economy, allowing its sailors and merchants to keep moving even as the world around them froze solid. The Dutch, unlike their European counterparts, responded creatively and effectively to climate change. While the Dutch lacked modern meteorological tools, they quantified the weather changes that they observed using natural landmarks. During the Little Ice Age, average temperatures in the Netherlands were nearly two degrees Celsius colder than today. The first northern artist to specialize in the “ice scene,” Avercamp’s paintings and drawings referenced relatively new local weather patterns. I argue that the Dutch winter landscape challenged local artists to grapple with the blank slate that they observed in their natural surroundings. This paper expands his discussion, asking if pictorial and geographic vagueness or placelessness was any more acceptable at home. Recently, Christopher Heuer has drawn attention to the ways that the Arctic’s cold terrain, which appeared indifferent to cultural production or national identity, irked Dutch travelers. This paper addresses the varied ways that seventeenth-century Dutch artists represented the conditions of winter and the possible cultural associations that winter landscape representations held for contemporary viewers, specifically recent reports of Dutch voyages to the Far North. The Dutch Golden Age coincided with the coldest stretch of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling during which time Holland endured an increased frequency in storms and the most frigid winters in its recent history. Current scholarship generally regards such works as illustrations of the extent to which the Dutch enjoyed winter or how the ice leveled class distinctions. Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, dated about 1608, is typical of the bustling winter scenes for which Dutch artists are known (fig. Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, ca. Seventeenth-Century Dutch Winter Landscapes: Visual Encounters with Non-Sites, Space, and Placeīy Rachel Kase Figure 1.
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