Winter Landscape

This 1660 winter landscape on panel, formerly in the Cook collection — one of the great private British art collections assembled in the Victorian era — shows Van de Cappelle returning late in his career to the frozen river subject he had explored in the early 1650s. The Cook collection, based at Doughty House in Richmond upon Thames, held exceptional Dutch and Flemish works that were dispersed in the twentieth century. This panel's later dating reveals how Van de Cappelle's winter scenes evolved: the figures become fewer, the atmosphere more diffuse, the palette even more restrained. By 1660 he had stripped the winter landscape of Avercamp's festive crowding to produce something closer to the contemplative emptiness that would appeal to much later sensibilities shaped by Romanticism.

The panel format, used throughout his career for winter scenes and marine subjects alike, supports a tight, controlled surface. Ice is distinguished from snow-covered ground through subtle value differences — ice slightly more luminous and bluish, snow warmer and more matte.