Skating on the Frozen Amstel River

The frozen Amstel has become a stage: hundreds of skaters are scattered across the ice, three men in dark cloaks stand in conversation by the bank, boys race with sticks, and in the foreground a figure in scarlet and a woman in a black hooded cloak move among what looks like the whole population of the city. Adam van Breen (c. 1585–1640) was born in Amsterdam and was among the first Dutch painters to make the winter landscape a speciality of its own, and this panel of 1611 shows both the ambition and the pleasure of the new genre: a rose-red windmill at the water’s edge, houses with stepped gables behind a fence painted in pink diamonds, a church and a wooden bridge receding into the haze, and azure sky breaking through steel-grey cloud above. The picture is a portrait of a city at play in the one season that turned its waterways into public ground. It is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.