Jan Wouwermans (1629-66) was the younger brother of Philips (1619-68) and like him spent his entire career in Haarlem. This scene belongs to a type invented by Hendrick Avercamp where a frozen river provides a stage upon which a species of spontaneous town fair takes places, with a rich variety of ages, classes and types carefully studied from life. When the genre reached Haarlem it was ‘toned down’ by Esaias van de Velde and Jan van Goyen, with lower horizons, thicker atmosphere and more muted colours. It is this Haarlem style of the skating scene which Jan Wouwermans presents here.

The frozen river scenes of Avercamp and later artists tend to include a venerable castle to provide a solid and lasting contrast to the impermanent world of the ice fair. In this case a semi-aristocratic country house is contrasted with a temporary beer tent set up by some enterprising profiteer and advertising its wares with a wreath, a Dutch flag and a jug slung over a pole. Around the tent men and children skate, ride in horse-drawn sleighs, push each other on sledges or punt themselves along the ice on wooden blocks.

The rarity of Jan Wouwermans’s works, discussed by the compiler of the 1819 inventory of Carlton House (he commented that…‘the works of this Master are very rare as he died young and left but a few Pictures’), did not seem to increase their value. This is one of the cheapest of George IV’s paintings and the only one he thought unworthy to hang in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham House, sending it instead to join the more rustic display of paintings at his newly built ‘cottage’ in Windsor Park (the present Royal Lodge).

Signed and dated: 'J. W./ 1657'

Text adapted from Dutch Landscapes, London, 2010