Jan van Goyen, 'A Scene on the Ice', 1645

The cold is almost tangible in Jan van Goyen’s evocation of life on the ice in a seventeenth-century Dutch winter. The horizon is low and the sky vast, so we are on a level with the people portrayed. A bank of grey cloud hovers overhead, just moving enough to let in the pale sun and allow a glimmer of reflection on the frozen waterway.

A group of figures is crowded into a wooden sledge – three men and one woman, whose skirt balloons out over the side. The horse is already headed towards the ice to haul the sledge across the river. A man in an old coat trudges along beside them while his skinny little dog lifts a foot awkwardly, as if unwilling to try the temperature of the ice in front of it. Another man tramps towards us holding a boat hook, still wearing his skates. Behind him, his companion clutches his clothes around him, gripped with cold and seemingly unable to move.

But some make a living from the weather. A man in a sledge stops to buy a drink from the owner of the makeshift tent. Under a darkening sky, the Dutch flag on top lifts a little in the wind. It’s too cold to snow. The man’s horse stands patiently, its mane hanging lank, an old, threadbare blanket flung over its back. It turns its head to us and with a tiny dot of paint, van Goyen has given it a feisty look in its eye.

Out on the ice, people go about their business. Two or three men play kolf, the forerunner of golf, but the rest seem to have little time to play or to enjoy the chance to skate for fun. The freezing air seems to have taken hold of them and they just keep moving, doing what needs to be done, or huddle into their garments.

The setting is an imaginary place, perhaps built up from the drawings van Goyen made in his many sketchbooks. The distant church spire and the windmill are unidentified – typical Dutch buildings that could be seen anywhere. Unlike Hendrik Avercamp’s two paintings in the National Gallery’s collection, A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle and A Scene on the Ice near a Town, this one evokes an atmosphere rather than showing colourful incidents to entertain the viewer. The tiny image is an elegy to winter. The colours are muted and swiftly painted, making the distant figures little more than grey outlines, almost like ghosts passing in the mist.