Ice and frozen scenes in art run from Flemish and Dutch skating pictures to Arctic shipwrecks of the 1800s. In the hard winters of the Little Ice Age, rivers froze solid, and whole towns walked onto them to skate and play.
In the 1800s, explorers sailed into the polar ice, which became a wall that ships ran into. One portrait here caused a scene in London when its sitter came to the exhibition dressed exactly as painted.
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How These Were Chosen
Ice has almost no color of its own. A smooth sheet reflects the sky, so a frozen river takes the color of the clouds above it. Thick ice absorbs red light and sends back blue, which is why icebergs look blue. So each painter here had to choose a color for it.
That ice had to be in every picture chosen, as the main subject or as the surface someone stands, skates or plays on. Snow alone did not count.
12. Aert van der Neer, A Frozen River by a Town at Evening (about 1665)
A frozen river runs past a town at dusk, under clouds still lit by the last of the sun. Aert van der Neer made dozens of winter landscapes like this small panel of about 1665, and the town in this one has never been identified.
He painted them in the years of the Little Ice Age, a long cold spell in Europe, when a run of severe winters from the 1640s to the 1660s made the frozen river part of ordinary life in the Dutch Republic. In this one, the light comes from a sun he kept just below the edge of the picture.
Its last rays tint the undersides of the dark clouds a reddish brown, and the deep green ice picks up that color and carries it down the river, something a gray surface could not have done. Above the roofs, broad dark strokes sweep across the sky to suggest wind.
Out on the ice, the town is at play. Skaters cross the river, and here and there men swing clubs at a ball in kolf, a Dutch game of club and ball.
Behind a tree in the right foreground, one man is busy with something else. Van der Neer painted him squatting, apparently relieving himself, the kind of earthy humor Dutch painting allowed.
Not every owner of the panel shared the joke. A later one found it in poor taste, and at some point the lower half of the figure disappeared under fresh paint. It stayed hidden until a cleaning in 1969 removed the overpaint, and the man came back behind his tree.
At a Glance
Artist: Aert van der Neer (about 1603 to 1677)
Painted: About 1665
Medium: Oil on wood, probably oak
Size: 26.4 × 40.5 cm (10.4 × 15.9 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery, London
11. Henry Raeburn, The Skating Minister (about 1795)
Lines scored into the ice around this skater's blades show that he has been out on the loch for some time. He is a clergyman, alone on Duddingston Loch at the edge of Edinburgh, holding a skating figure that takes real skill.
The canvas hangs under the name of Henry Raeburn, the leading portrait painter in Edinburgh in those years. Yet who actually painted it is still argued over, and the argument turns on two very different kinds of evidence.