Skating in Holland, Imitator of Johan Barthold Jongkind
In seventeenth-century Holland there was a fashion for depictions of winter scenes; this was a period of harsh winters that brought heavy snowfall and caused rivers to freeze over. This scene with people skating on a frozen river in Holland is similar to pictures made by Johan Barthold Jongkind, who was working in this older tradition in the 1860s, but is probably a forgery made by an imitator of Jongkind’s style.
Although Jongkind spent most of his working life in Paris, he returned to the Netherlands in 1855 and stayed there until 1860. He produced several views of his native Holland, which the imitator has tried to evoke in this picture. The limited colour palette of muted greys and the short, rapid brushstrokes used to apply the paint are also evocative of Jongkind’s pictures.
