Hendrick Avercamp

While I was browsing the immense rooms of exhibitions with celebrated artists in Vienna - Museum of Art History has the whole halls focused on Rubens, Tizian, Velázquez and Pieter Brueghel the Elder - somewhere in the corner I spotted something that really delighted me, a painting by my old friend Henrick Avercamp. Now, Avercamp is not exactly obscure but he is neither celebrated on the scale as previously mentioned artists who painted large, religious paintings full of flesh, blood and thunder and in fact Avercamp is master of relatively smaller, completely individual world: he specialised in winter landscapes with lots of tiny human figures skating on the ice. I am almost 100% sure you saw at least one of his paintings, because he was very well known in his lifetime and I remember admiring them with childlike excitement in Amsterdam, Hague and London, these paintings are incredibly sweet little stories full of characters who are moving, kissing, playing, talking and doing all sorts of things. Apparently he lived in what is now knows as "little ice age" when lower temperatures resulted in rivers and lakes being frozen, nowadays you can never see canals frozen in Amsterdam or people skating on them. 

That Avercamp filled his paintings with almost audible non-stop action and happy noise, comes as bittersweet surprise because he was born mute.

I cannot even imagine what kind of life he must have led, was he happy, sad or lonely in 17th century Amsterdam but once I found out about this, I loved him even more. When faced with palace filled with hundreds of different artists, naturally you select those who speak to your heart and while celebrated names might occasionally make you stop and admire, Avercamp was always my friend from the start. So as I slowly walked trough Museum of Art History and wondered should I go this way or the other (rooms are arranged in such way that you are always faced with choices that exclude each other unless you walk back and forth) and big names cover the whole walls, somewhere in all this opulence there it was, my beloved mute Avercamp - how I stumbled upon him, I have no idea because his painting is not prominently displayed at all and I even missed some other, far more celebrated works (no wonder, as its simply too much to soak everything in) but there we were, Avercamp and me. I was really, honestly happy to see him in such wonderful collection and even blew him a kiss, to my dear friend. 

It occurred to me - at that particular moment - how strange that even though nobody ever taught me or remotely pointed at this direction during my upbringing, somehow I cultivated my own curiosity, taste and affinity for art and here I am, visiting famous galleries around the world and recognising my favourites. Sure, we all have our own individual tastes and reasons, I for one have almost no patience for religious art but somehow react profoundly to something that either pleases me aesthetically or touches me, as Hendrick Avercamp does. 

Here is a painting I saw in Hague and if you look closely it has joyous scene with a fat woman who fell on the ice and her backside is showing.