A Woman Doing Laundry in an Ice Hole (recto) (c. 1618): Art, History and Details

A Woman Doing Laundry in an Ice Hole (recto) (c. 1618) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Hendrick Avercamp (Netherlandish, 1585–1634).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp became widely known for his near-exclusive production of winter landscapes, often featuring large crowds made up of different social classes congregated on the Netherlands’ iced canals and rivers and engaged in various activities from ice skating and socializing to doing laundry, fishing, and hauling goods. In this drawing, he sketched a woman squatting to do laundry at a hole in the ice, accompanied by a child who wipes tears from her eyes. On the verso (back) of the same sheet, two men in elegant, middle-class attire appear to be socializing. The artist kept such sheets in his workshop for reference in his larger, multi-figured, finished compositions.

Object facts

• Title: A Woman Doing Laundry in an Ice Hole (recto)
• Date: c. 1618
• Creator attribution: Hendrick Avercamp (Netherlandish, 1585–1634)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black and red chalk, graphite, watercolor heightened with white on blue paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 11.7 x 13.4 cm (4 5/8 x 5 1/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - Dutch
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2024.74.a

A detail from the museum

Though incomplete due to the cut of the sheet, the gestures of the men on the back of this drawing suggest they could be engaged in a game of kolf, a ball and paddle game played on the ice that appears frequently in the artist’s winter scenes.

Collection credit

Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.