Esaias van de Velde, 'A Winter Landscape', 1623

This little picture completely captures the atmosphere of a late winter’s day. The soft, muted colours convey the cold and bleakness of the scene, but also suggest the promise of coming warmth.

The snow has mostly gone, although small patches hold on tenaciously, especially on the trunks of the quirky trees by the path. The wide river is grey and uninviting, still frozen enough to bear people, but a tinge of yellowish green around some of the distant trees may suggest early growth, like catkins. The grey, misty sky has a faint band of blue across it and there seems to be a bright patch just beyond the kolf players – a forerunner of golf, often played on the ice in Holland – on the frozen pond on the left. But the most cheering moment in the picture is at the back of the house. On the wall is a shadow of the gnarled old tree: the sun has definitely come out, if only for a minute or two.

But perhaps it’s not enough for the people trudging along to notice. The path still looks slippery. There seems to be a look of sympathy between the little boy holding an older man’s hand and the shivering dog beside them. Another lad watching the kolf players, with little enthusiasm for their skill, wears skates and keeps his hands in his pockets. A woman with a child looks out over the icy expanse of the river.

Esaias van de Velde gives us these few characters in his picture, but they aren‘t its main feature – they’re part of the whole. He was among the first of the Dutch artists of the early seventeenth century to adopt a new style of painting winter landscapes. Artists like Hendrick Avercamp, working only 15 years before, painted bird’s-eye views of lots of little characters against a background of buildings and a vast sky, almost like a stage set (like A Scene on the Ice near a Town or A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle). Although this style continued for a while, van de Velde and other painters living in Haarlem wanted to express what it felt like to be out on such a day, rather than just observing it as entertainment. Here, while we are still a little high up, we're on a level with the church on the far bank. There are fewer figures, too – just enough to involve us, but not enough to distract from the view.