An Old Dutch Skating Painting

Nicolas Baur, Women’s Skating Competition Stadsgracht, Leeuwarden, 21 January 1809, 1809. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

I found this 19th-century Dutch skating picture in a November 2013 The Magazine Antiques article about Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, who had just sold this work to the Rijksmuseum. The acquisition was so recent that the Rijksmuseum did not yet have an image of the painting on its website – it does now – but it dis provide this interesting anecdote about the real-life skating race depicted.

At a women’s skating race in Leeuwarden in 1809, the crowd watched sixty-four unmarried women vie for a gold cap-brooch. The winner was Houkje Gerrits Bouma. For greater ease, many had thrown off their cloaks. Baur painted the finalists with bare arms, a jettisoned cloak on the ice. It left little to men’s imagination and caused an outcry; therefore it was the last women’s race for many years.

Source: Rijksmuseum collection database, although they seem to have changed to different wording since I originally posted this.

I also found this seventeenth-century skating painting by Hendrick Avercamp on the Rijksmuseum’s website. If you’re looking for ice skating art, I guess a museum in Holland is a pretty good place to look.