At Least Our Bad Winter Was No ‘Little Ice Age’

• By Jeremy B. White
• Roll Call Staff
• March 18, 2010, Midnight

For Washingtonians inundated by a record amount of snow this February, the wintry weather was more a nuisance than a source of pleasure, the crystalline beauty soon giving way to endless shoveling and plodding through prodigious mountains of slush. The ferocity of winter disrupted the daily rhythms of life. Those who found it difficult to cope might want to visit the National Gallery of Art, where a new exhibition of winter landscape paintings by Hendrick Avercamp reveals how Dutch society adapted to the frigid realities of particularly harsh winters during Europe’s “Little Ice Age.” In Avercamp’s fastidiously detailed works, frozen lakes and rivers become the nexus in which all strata of Dutch society meet and mingle beneath a heavy gray sky.