Room 16

In the seventeenth century the Little Ice Age settled over Northern Europe. Rivers and canals in Holland froze over and people took to the ice for work, leisure – and accidents. Hendrik Avercamp, just starting out as an artist, took to it too. His life’s work became the depiction of winter scenes...

Seventeenth-century Dutch winters were notorious for their Arctic cold, with canals and rivers frozen over. In the little town that Avercamp takes us to everyone is out on the ice, making the best of it: working, playing, showing off, laughing, complaining, falling over or just about managing to...

Scenes of small groups of people making music were common in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. They reflected a popular social activity among sophisticated families and as such might symbolise the harmony of family life or friendship groups. But such parties were also an accepted way for young...

This is one of the best examples of Gerrit Dou’s brilliance at depicting different surfaces and textures, like the fraying cloth crumpled underneath a bucket, the smooth stone of the sill, the feathers in the duck’s wing and the pocked skin of its breast and neck.Dou was one of the most successfu...

This very small and very unusual painting shows the view of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft as though through a wide-angle lens. The effect is emphasised by two musical instruments, set out on a table by the man – probably a maker of, or dealer in, such instruments.The violin (or possibly a viola da gam...

This is one of the best seventeenth-century examples of what today we might think of as a high-resolution image. The detail and brushwork are so fine that no matter how closely you look at, or zoom in on, the picture, it never quite seems to pixelate. Yet the painter has made a very strange mista...

In the sunlight of a quiet afternoon this courtyard seems to radiate tranquillity. Everything is still, including the figures: a young maid, clean and calm, who holds the hand of a little girl, and the shadowy figure of a woman in the passageway to the left, presumably the child’s mother, who tur...

A young couple seem about to strike up a duet. The woman, seated at the keyboard of a virginal, hands her partner a musical score, presumably the part for the violin on the table next to him. Scenes of music making among young people were common in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and they wou...

At first glance, Caspar Netscher shows two delightful children, both busy. The girl is learning to read while the boy plays with the dog, his toys, including a top, thrown down on the floor.There may be moral in the painting, though it was more likely to have been bought for amusement. In a popul...

A velvet curtain drawn back from a stone window reveals a little boy, who gazes upwards at a bubble floating past him and into the darkness. In the shadows behind, a smaller child concentrates equally fiercely. Using a long pipe he blows bubbles in the soapy liquid held in a cockle shell. Already...

On 12 October 1654 – the date inscribed on the painting – one of the gunpowder stores in the city of Delft accidentally detonated, flattening a large part of the city. A local artist, Egbert van der Poel, was so fascinated by the event that he painted this scene at least 20 times. Judging from co...

A grey, turbulent sky dominates the scene, but our eye is also caught by a patch of light in the fields: the sun has broken through a crack in the clouds.This sense of fast-changing light brings the whole landscape to life, injecting movement into what otherwise might have been a static scene. Th...

This painting – an evocation of light, space, soaring architecture and ordered elegance – shows the inside of the Buurkerk in Utrecht. Several Dutch artists of the time specialised in painting church interiors, but Saenredam was particularly innovative. He exaggerated for effect: here he has stre...

Between 1634 and 1637, Saenredam made a series of views of the interior of the Grote Kerk (or the Cathedral of St Bavo) in Haarlem, the city where he lived and worked – this is one of them.Even though it is a small picture, it required an enormous amount of work. Saenredam made sketches on site,...

An elegantly dressed young woman plays a harpsichord for a man leaning on the instrument. Music is often related to love in Dutch paintings, but in contrast to other genre scenes of this kind the couple don‘t appear to be flirting. The young woman is concentrating on her sheet of music.The Latin...

This sparkling little picture is unusual among Jan Steen’s paintings. We are outside an inn – The White Swan, to judge by its sign – rather than in its dark interior, Steen’s more typical setting.The energetic pose of the man bowling suggests that he’s serious about his game and that, given a mom...

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 concentr...

It appears to be dark outside this elegant room: a blue curtain covers the top part of the window, but the glass below it is black. The light which glints in the heavily dilated pupils of the woman seated at the keyboard comes from in front of the painting, an unusual effect for Vermeer.Significa...

The young woman at the keyboard holds our eye with a direct gaze. The empty chair suggests she is expecting someone and the large painting of a naked Cupid, the god of erotic love, on the wall behind her may be a signal that she is waiting for her lover. Scenes of music making were a popular genr...