The Unexpected Joys of a Cold Reality

Yes, winter may seem unforgiving. Yet Avercamp’s "Winter Landscape with Iceskaters" suggests that it is in the harshness of winter’s grip that human life finds its most unique pleasures.

In the cold, sharp air of the seventeenth century, where the Dutch skies had already taken on the stern gray of industrial development, Hendrick Avercamp’s “Winter Landscape with Iceskaters” provides a wonderful moment of contradiction. It’s a painting not just of winter, but of winter alive, bubbling, skating, and cracking with the frenzy of human existence—an odd, exquisite celebration of ice and snow in all their anarchic, physical glory. A wonder in its own right, the painting is not simply a study of landscape or season, but a vignette—no, a “deep dive” as we say today—into the small mysteries and unforeseen pleasures of human life distilled into the frame of a frozen pond, where the cruel edges of winter meet the warmth of community and bodily expression.

If one is to consider the cold, one must first consider its tyranny: how it dominates the visual field, the lifeblood of nature. But Avercamp, a man who seems to have sensed the peculiar humor that winter itself harbors, brings us to the ice not as a frozen, barren landscape but as a living, breathing terrain, an unspoken playground where the rules of nature and of society simultaneously demand and suspend themselves. Through the freezing of water, a temporary and strange union is formed—a bridge across which men, women, and children glide, tumble, and whirl in a mad show of both grace and awkwardness, unafraid of the winter’s bite.

And there they are, the skaters, with their long coats, hats askew, and broad strokes of feet pushing against the ice—both grace and absurdity, and in their collective motion, a simultaneous understanding of the winter’s invitation: come, come play, come release yourself from the grip of your inner winter. With each turn of the skate, each slip on the ice, they manifest a world not of denial, but of acceptance—a world where humans, with all their fragility, exist against the hard backdrop of ice. The scene plays out not as a tragedy of the cold, but as its triumph.

Consider the scene as a landscape of human resilience, where even the most humbling falls—those slips caught in the most comic contortions—are as much a part of the joy as the effortless glides of the more experienced. There, in those small, unceremonious tumbles, the drama of existence plays out with far more humor than despair. Who could not delight in the two figures, legs bent awkwardly as they lay flat on the ice, even as others continue their intricate, almost imperceptible ballet, tracing their own arcs of joy in the frozen air? The painting doesn’t just acknowledge these mistakes, these moments of imperfection—it celebrates them, as if to say: this, too, is life.

The cast of characters in Avercamp’s landscape form a strange, self-contained universe. But beyond the figures skating, this joyful scene reveals its complexity in the lives of others: the solitary figures standing at the edge, the clustered groups of spectators along the ice's border, all of them sharing the same sense of space, the same cold breath in the air. A pregnant pause hovers in the scene, like the lingering exhale of a community caught in the timeless pause between action and contemplation. Some stand at the fringes, watching the spectacle unfold; others are more active, struggling to maintain their balance, while in the distance, the slight curve of the windmills cut sharply through the scene, marking it as distinctively of its time and place. It is a landscape bound together by both human activity and the overwhelming stillness of the ice, each figure tied to the next, connected by the very act of sharing this frozen moment in time.

We see the children, those early initiates into the cold world of balance and skill, their faces lit with a mix of anxiety and excitement as they clutch one another, learning, unlearning, and learning again. There is something wonderfully tactile about their awkwardness, as if they are still discovering the very limits of what the body can endure in the cold. This notion of the body’s vulnerability against the harshness of the winter landscape—and its triumph—runs through the entire scene.

Yet the human presence isn’t the only thing stirring the landscape. In the corner of the scene, near the frozen edge of the pond, a dog—its body warm against the chill—gnaws at the remains of a carcass. Its instincts, unrefined and unceremonious, direct it to feast on whatever it can scavenge, pulling at the soft flesh, the remnants of something that, though once alive, now lies discarded by the cold, neglected and left behind. The sharp contrast of the dog’s savage feast and the delicate, cultured skaters represents the full spectrum of existence, one that fluctuates between humanity’s attempts at refinement and the base, animal nature that persists, no matter the season.

To be sure, the painting refuses to grant the viewer the comfort of isolation; the ice itself is brimming with humanity’s imperfection and determination. Every skater’s stroke, every twist of the ankle, creates an illusion of motion that, in its ceaseless repetition, is both dreamlike and absurd. The painting captures the moments in between the moments—when the skaters glide in mid-air, or when the illusion of motion gives way to their frozen counterparts. It shows winter not as a period of death or dormancy, but of creative activity, a fertile ground for human invention and playfulness.

Yes, winter may seem unforgiving. Yet Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Iceskaters suggests that it is in the harshness of winter’s grip that human life finds its most unique pleasures. There’s no romanticization here of a hard, frozen world, but a recognition that the chaos and difficulty of life—whether embodied in a fall, a slip, or an awkward moment—can be as much a part of the wonder of human existence as any carefully executed, practiced motion. In this, winter itself is not a season of constraint, but of exuberance, freedom, and possibility.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico) and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.