Jan Beerstraaten, The Castle of Muiden in Winter

The heavy, black clouds that hang low over the castle seem to threaten snow and yet more snow. Although a fitful sun struggles through, the eerie light on the castle’s yellow walls and steely tipped towers seems to come more from the moon than the sun.

The tiny people skating on the ice seem insignificant against the building’s imposing presence – they are little more than silhouettes, skating, sledging and playing kolf, the forerunner of golf, in the semi-dark. The opposite is true of the paintings of Hendrick Avercamp – like A Scene on the Ice near a Town and A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle – where the buildings are a background for dozens of tiny skaters whose clothes and activities are painted with exquisite detail.

Muiden Castle was one of the oldest and most important medieval castles in early seventeenth-century Holland, and Beerstraaten treats the painting as a dramatic portrait of the ancient building rather than as a skating scene. Seen from the north-east, the image is accurate and atmospheric, with the tiny skaters simply an enlivening motif. The artist has, however, altered the arrangement of the rest of the landscape to suit the painting’s composition. In reality, from the north-east the sea would appear behind the castle, but Beerstraaten needed the reflected light to pick out the front of the building and take the eye into the distance beyond it. You can see a view of the castle from the west, albeit in the distance, in Fishermen near Muiden Castle.

Probably built in the early fourteenth century for Count Floris V of Holland, the castle is about seven miles from Amsterdam, at the entry of the Vecht river into the Zuiderzee. It came into its own in the early seventeenth century when it was the home of Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft, a famous Dutch poet and historian. It became the cultural centre of the Dutch Republic: eminent poets, composers and statesmen would gather there to debate, play music and declaim their poetry, a group that became known as the Muiderkring (‘The Muider Circle’). Among these was Constantijn Huygens, whose talents were many – poet, musician, designer: the quintessential Renaissance man. His portrait by Thomas Keyser is in the National Gallery’s collection.

Hooft died in 1647, some seven years before the picture was painted. The glittering life within the castle’s walls disappeared and it fell into disrepair until it was saved from demolition in 1825. It was opened as a national museum in 1878 and you can still see it today, the building and its gardens both fully restored.