On this day: ice-skating weather
William M. Vander Weyde | Ice Skating | ca. 1900 | George Eastman House
It’s snowing today in New York City and crowds are lining up to skate at the legendary ice rink at Rockefeller Center, with its sparkling light displays and famous holiday tree. If I visit this year, it’ll be as a spectator only, since I’ve never ice skated in my life. Sad, I know, but I have a good excuse—I grew up in extremely warm areas of Mexico and Texas, so I didn’t have many opportunities to learn. But that doesn’t stop me from admiring skaters. I love their graceful gliding, and enjoy seeing the camaraderie that spontaneously develops when groups of people converge on the ice. Evidently I’m not alone, judging from the many depictions of skating groups in the Artstor Digital Library.
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- Modes et Manières No. 19 : L’Ecolière craintive | 1800 | Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Dept. of Prints, Drawings and Photographs
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- Vervik | Ice Skaters | 1777 | The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
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- Paul Gauguin | Skaters in the Park in Frederiksberg | 1884 | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com
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- Wurts Bros. | Brooklyn Friends Seminary | 1940 | Museum of the City of New York
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- Hendrick Avercamp | Ice Skaters | early 17th century | The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com; scalarchives.com | (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
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- Ice Skates | 1840-1859 | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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- Francis Carruthers Gould | A national skating party | 2nd half 19th-early 20th Century | British Museum
The images in this post are but a small sampling of the hundreds of images you can find in the Digital Library by searching for skat* (the asterisk can represent zero, one, or several characters, thus leading you to results for skate, skaters, skating, etc.); click on them to see the sources. We encourage you to explore the Rijksmuseum, George Eastman House, and the Museum of the City of New York collections in particular, as they each have loads of skating images—enough to tempt even me to give skating a try.
Henri Charles Antoine Baron | Ice Skaters | 1852 | Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille | Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN)