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The impact of Flemish tradition on Dutch painting can be clearly seen in winter landscapes. The first Dutch artist to specialize in these was Hendrick Avercamp, who took the Brueghelian pattern for recording winter's pastimes, and transposed it to the watersides - and ice - of Dutch city canals. His insistence on this fortuitously picked and elaborately developed formula reveals the lasting popularity of the subject. The vogue for winter scenes was stimulated by the "Little Ice Age" (lasting approximately from 1550 to 1800), which brought unusually cold winters to the Low Countries.
Hendrick Avercamp is by far the best-known seventeenth-century painter of ice scenes. The present painting is one of his rare works on round panel, a format seldom used for landscapes in the Northern Netherlands in the early seventeenth century.
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