Avercamp, Hendrick

Winter Landscape

1605-10; Oil on oak, 25 x 34 cm; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne

Avercamp's early Winter Landscape, with its general view and colourful narrative character, is very much in the tradition of the famous winter landscapes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. But Avercamp's winter landscapes painted after the 1620s - reflecting the trends of the period - are composed with the now fashionable low horizon and vanishing-point perspective.