The Humorous Diversion of Sliding on the Ice

Francis Hayman's Humorous Diversion of Sliding on the Ice, another of his Vauxhall Gardens paintings dated 1741 to 1742, captures a popular winter street entertainment that was a common sight in Georgian London during cold snaps. Ice sliding had associations with both Dutch winter landscape tradition and the more specifically English comedic culture of public amusement, and Hayman transposes the Dutch genre subject — Avercamp's skating parties — into a thoroughly English comic idiom. Vauxhall's programme under Jonathan Tyers aimed to celebrate and affirm English popular culture, and subjects like this placed English street life within the respectable framework of a pleasure garden and its decorative paintings. Hayman's work for Vauxhall helped establish the English genre tradition at a critical moment of national cultural self-definition.

The sliding figures provide natural compositional energy, their bodies in motion creating diagonal and curved forms that animate the horizontal format. Hayman renders the ice surface with the light reflective quality appropriate to its subject, the figures silhouetted against its pale expanse. The handling is lively and informal, the scene designed to produce immediate recognition and amusement.