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Winter landscape with ice-skaters on a frozen pond by a village

(c. 1695 Netherlands)

Colnaghi

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This painting portrays a snowy winter landscape with ice-skaters on a frozen pond by a village. The centre of the composition is dominated by a windmill which acts as a foil to the moated chateau on the right. To the left of the composition a group of villagers huddle round a fire in a tent, while to the right of the foreground a hunter shoots duck and, in the middle ground a group of children are playing on a bridge. The large size of the copper plate allowed Griffier to give free rein to his imagination, presenting a whole range of human activities in a charmingly varied, panoramic landscape.

Jan Griffier, whom Arnold Houbraken dubbed ‘a burgher of the world’, was a Dutch landscape painter and engraver who studied under Roelandt Roghman. Around 1660 he moved to London and continued his studies there under Jan Looten. Looten and Roghman were best known for their topographical views, which are generally painted on a large scale and with an earthy tonality. Griffier’s enormous painting of Noah’s Ark, formerly at Nettlecombe Court, Somerset, is painted in a style which reflects their influence, but the majority of the pictures painted in his middle years are very different in style and subject matter. In his numerous Rhineland landscapes, for example, Griffier’s work displays a highly finished, refined technique and bright colouring, which reflects the influence of Herman Saftleven. In 1667 Griffier was admitted to the London Painter-Stainer’s company and during these years he also produced highly accomplished etchings of natural history subjects after Francis Barlow, and he was an early practitioner of mezzotint, producing attractive prints in the new medium after the portraits of Lely and Kneller. He was also a prolific and accomplished topographical artist, who played a pioneering role in the representation of the British landscape in both oils and engravings. Around 1695 Griffier returned to Holland, where he stayed for about ten years, and it is to this late period of his activity that the present Winter Landscape must be assigned.