Adriaen van de Velde, 'Golfers on the Ice near Haarlem', 1668

Paintings of life on the frozen waterways of Holland during the Little Ice Age were very popular with collectors at the time. Many artists, usually known for painting rivers or landscapes, produced them, and Adriaen van de Velde was one of the most successful.

But in this painting he has concentrated on individual characters and their activities rather than details of the icy landscape. He has shown little to suggest the freezing conditions, except the touch of frost on brittle grass to the left, the runners rather than wheels on two or three vehicles and a couple of people hunched up or cloaked. The landscape might be a river, or possibly a wide plane; the shadows don't have the shimmer of frozen reflection that ice might have.

Perhaps the warmth in the sun, which make the faces and the clothes of the men on the right glow, is what takes the edge off the chill. It’s as if van de Velde couldn’t resist making his sky soft and radiant, in the manner of Dutch artists who had been to Rome and whose style he adopted. The horizon is low, making the sky vast and allowing him to bring the vivid detail of his figures close to us. Compare this with the crowded, wintry scenes of Hendrick Avercamp, such as A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle. In Avercamp’s painting, the view is largely imagined; in this picture, the distant outline of the Grote Kerk of Haarlem with its spindly spire is recognisable, and a nearby windmill breaks the skyline.

The men in the foreground play kolf, the forerunner of golf. People of all ranks could take part, and it was guaranteed to draw onlookers to give opinions and advice. The player with jaunty red tassels on his petticoat breeches takes aim to hit the post put in position by the man just peeping out from behind him. In the centre, a man with a bag slung on a stick over his shoulder stops to watch, and a young lad – one of the coldest looking figures, hands stuffed in his pockets and a hint of snow on one boot – watches with his kolf stick at his side, as if longing to join in.

Two women, one bundled up in a black shawl against the cold, her face hardly visible, ride in a heavy, boat-shaped sledge; a man in a ragged jacket, a skullcap and an apron strains to shove it forward. Behind him a woman in a white bonnet shares the task, but relaxes for a moment to stare out at us, almost smiling. In front of the sledge a second woman reaches forward as if running to catch something – perhaps the lively little dog yapping at some of the kolf players. The single fine line of black paint that seems to start under her apron, passing behind the gawping lad to the sledge, suggests that she is bearing the brunt of hauling the heavy sledge over the ice.