\paperw19995 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 This painting represents a typical winter landscape in the Netherlands, stretching away toward an indefinite horizon on whic
h Van der Neer focuses.\par
The bare trees provide a setting for a scene from everyday life, where each aspect depicted has a character all its own.\par
In the foreground we see members of the upper middle class playing a game of hockey.\par
The vast
frozen expanse is animated by small figures in movement, chiefly young people skating along cheerfully and families out for a stroll, dragging sleds behind them. In the mist we can make out the city, which looks on like an empty ghost town as its inhabi
tants indulge in their traditional amusements. A few wretched houses loom out of the mist along the course of the river, along with a typical windmill standing by itself on the left.\par
The work is an example of a genre that was very widely-practiced
in seventeenth-century Netherlands.\par
Many other painters chose to represent the theme of frozen rivers, their banks dotted with villages, mills and woods and thronged with tiny figures in characteristic attitudes. In this case the work of art also s
erves the function of an invaluable record of past customs.
