Jan van Goyen, A Scene on the Ice near Dordrecht

Barely a third of van Goyen’s painting of life on the ice in seventeenth-century Dordrecht shows people; the rest is sky. But he still manages to pack the picture full of incident and humour. Some people squeeze into horse-drawn sledges – the large one close to us is signed van Goyen and dated on the back panel – while others zoom across the ice or stand around and chat. Some play kolf, the forerunner of golf – or miss their shot and fall over, watched by an unhelpful dog.

The air is still with a mist of frost and yet the picture seems to move – a skirt flaps, a hat skids on the ice, legs kick in the air. We know which of the skaters is practised and moving at speed and which are beginners, clinging on, their bodies tense. Facial expressions are shown with a flick of the brush.

The large building on the right is the Riedijk water gate, outside Dordrecht. Further away across the frozen Merwede river, on the left, stands Merwede Castle, already a ruin by van Goyen’s time. These same ruins appear in Peasants and Cattle by the River Merwede by Aelbert Cuyp. For other skating pictures, look at Hendrick Avercamp’s A Scene on the Ice near a Town and A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle.