The artist has chosen a low vantage point, giving us a broad view of the frozen river as far as the horizon, with farmsteads and cottages lining both banks. Above, the cold blue sky takes up the greater part of the picture space. Based on style and costume, the present painting can be dated to circa 1660.

This work displays van der Neer’s greatness in evoking the effects of light and atmosphere in winter. In the middle of the century, both van der Neer and his fellow Amsterdam artist, Jan van de Capelle, were particularly fascinated with these wintry effects. The scene is set in the late afternoon, the wintry setting sun bathing the clouded horizon in lemon yellow and rosy tones. The warm hues of the sunset are suffused throughout the landscape by their reflection in the broad expanse of ice. The painter appears to have scratched into the wet paint of the sky in places, to suggest a particular effect of winter light. White highlights stand out against the muted brown tones of cottages and trees, evoking a covering layer of snow. In the foreground, the grasses on the riverbank are brushed with snow, while little dots of white suggest a sprinkling of snow flakes that have settled. Van der Neer was in fact the only Dutch painter of the seventeenth century to attempt to suggest snow fall; he achieves this with great subtlety in a painting of around the same date, c. 1655-60, Winter Landscape in a Blizzard.

The present painting is comparable to Sports on a Frozen River, probably of the same date (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). It is generally agreed that van der Neer produced his greatest work from the mid 1640s until after 1660, the year in which these mature paintings were probably produced. Van der Neer’s large oeuvre consists mainly of river landscapes painted under specific lighting conditions: dawn, sunset, moonlight and full nocturnes, in which a conflagration on the river bank provides the only source of light.