Winter landscape in front of the city wall, a wooden sledge on the bridge, 1788

About the Work

In the late eighteenth century, Jacob Cats produced several cycles of the seasons. Whereas they made reference to Baroque landscape art in terms of both form and content, they departed from the seventeenth-century conception of nature as subject to a divine order. The artist was concerned instead with a sense of immediacy and the emotional and aesthetic pleasure of atmospheric moods. The round watercolour may once have been part of a series of four, but it is also possible that the artist was commissioned with two works contrasting summery warmth (“Landscape with Cottage in the Forest (Summer)” (Inv.-Nr. 3732)) with wintry frost.