Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and The Hague’s Mauritshuis have jointly acquired one of the most important winter landscape scenes from the Dutch Golden Age: Colf Players on the Ice, painted around 1625 by Hendrick Avercamp. To celebrate its homecoming, the masterpiece will first go on display in a special exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Kampen, Avercamp’s birthplace, from October 3rd to January 10th, 2027. After that, the two museums will split custody. This is the first time the Netherland’s two greatest museums, respectively home of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, are sharing an artwork.

Between 1575 and 1625, northern Europe experienced a period of severe winters known as “The Little Ice Age.” The rivers, canals, lakes and ports of below-sea-level Holland froze over for months. Avercamp was the first Dutch artist to specialize in depicting winter scenes, capturing people enjoying the cold in sports like ice skating, sledding and colf, and experiencing the harshness of having to work and live in such conditions.

Colf Players on the Ice is regarded as a highlight of Avercamp’s oeuvre. Unlike in his earlier winter landscape teeming with human figures, the artist focuses here on a small group in the foreground. The low vantage point makes us feel that we too are on the ice, and part of the scene. The focus is on two men playing colf – one of the oldest ball games in the Low Countries, and a forerunner of golf – as fishers, passers-by and other spectators watch the game. The painting is therefore not only a fabulous wintry scene, it is also the earliest known depiction of colf.

Colf was a popular year-round game in the Netherlands, played in the squares, church yards and the streets of town. Like golf, it was played by hitting a ball with a club, but unlike golf, the target was a vertical stick rather than a hole. Walloping balls through the streets of small, densely-inhabited towns had the unfortunate side-effect of breaking a lot of windows, and many towns passed ordinances prohibiting the game. The icy surfaces away from windows made the ideal colfing pitch.

Avercamp’s winter scenes are filled with details, capturing people from all walks of life. In Colf Players on the Ice, the gentleman in kuitbroek (knee breeches) wields the colf club while commoners like an ice fishermen and the little boy with a net helping him watch the game. The clothes are a snapshot of fashions followed by the merchants and burghers, as well as the rugged winterwear of the working classes.

For many years, the painting was on long-term loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from the collection of British art dealers Edward and Sally Speelman. Speelman is an expert in Dutch old master paintings, and has amassed a significant private collection. They sold Colf Players on the Ice for a hefty price tag of $13 million.

The acquisition is very important for the Netherlands. Although several paintings by Avercamp are in Dutch public collections, almost all of them are early works. Colf Players on the Ice , on the other hand, shows the innovative nature of his mature style, and is thus an essential addition to the Dutch national collection.

An exceptionally rare drawing book from the early 17th century has been donated to the Rijksmuseum by the family who has owned it for more than 300 years. Very few drawing books from the period have survived intact because individual drawings were more saleable so the pages made much more money when sold piecemeal. The books were taken apart, bindings destroyed, and the pages scattered.

The Van Eeghen Drawing Book contains about 30 full-page drawings of biblical scenes, some on blue paper, and smaller studies of figures and animals. They are in exceptional condition, because unlike drawings that were cut out of their bindings, the pages inside the book were almost never exposed to light.

The book is named after the Van Eeghen family who treasured the intact book, handing it down through the generations for more than three centuries without selling a single drawing, even though neither they nor anybody else knew who the artist was. It was only very recently, about 20 years ago, that C.P. van Eeghen (1921-2014) saw a drawing by Rombout Uylenburgh in the Rijksmuseum collection and connected it to one in the book.

Rombout Uylenburgh (1580/85–1627/28) was born in Leeuwarden, in the northern Dutch province of Friesland. His family moved to Kraków when he was still a boy and he grew up to become painter at the court of Polish King Sigismund III. He moved to Danzig in 1612 where his career continued to thrive. He specialized in grisailles, monochrome paintings in shades of grey.

After Rombout Uylenburgh’s death, he quickly fell into obscurity, even as his family became ever more prominent on the business side. His brother Hendrick, who had worked for Sigismund III as a commercial agent acquiring art works for the king, moved to Amsterdam and became Rembrandt’s art dealer. Rembrandt’s wife Saskia was one of Rombout and Hendrick’s cousins.

There is no documentation of how the Van Eeghen family acquired the book, but there’s a hint on the binding: an inscription in gold lettering reading “Konstboeck voor Reyer Claessoon” (“Art book for Reyer Claessoon”). Reyer Claessoon was a prominent member of the Dutch community in Danzig when Rombout Uylenburgh lived there. He and Uylenburgh were both Mennonites, so almost certainly knew each other personally. The Van Eeghen family were also part of the Danzig Mennonite community. This is likely the path the book took.

Only two drawings by Uylenburgh are known to survive, one of which is in the Rijksmuseum collection, plus a handful of his paintings, so the Van Eeghen Drawing Book is now one of the stand-out treasures of the Rijksmuseum Print Room Collection. With a loan from the Rembrandt House Museum, the Rijksmuseum has brought together most of the surviving works by Uylenburgh for a special exhibition introducing the drawing book and the little known artist to the public.

The flag flown from HMS Royal Sovereign at the Battle of Trafalgar has been saved for the nation by the North East Museums. One of only three surviving British flags from the epic 1805 battle between the English and Napoleonic navies, it sold at auction to a foreign buyer last year. The UK’s Minister of Culture placed a temporary export bar on the flag to prevent it leaving the country and giving local institutions the chance to acquire it.

Thanks to donations from organizations, including £400,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, North East Museums was able to raise the purchase price of £450,000 ($600,000) and secure this iconic emblem of Britain. They are now raising funds to create a permanent custom display for this huge flag at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle.

The flag has a specific connection to northeastern England. It is also known as the Collingwood Trafalgar flag after Vice Admiral Collingwood, commander of HMS Royal Sovereign and Newcastle upon Tyne native. He was just 13 years old when he enlisted in the British navy in 1761, and worked his way up the ranks, earing the rank of vice-admiral and serving as second in command of the British Fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Not only was Collingwood a local lad, but much of his crew was too. They were nicknamed the “Tars of the Tyne” because so many of them came from the Tyne and Wear county of northeastern England. Furthermore, they weren’t just fighting under this flag, they actually made it too. It is the only one of the three surviving Trafalgar flags that was handmade by the crew of the ship whose foremast it flew from.

The Union Flag will form the centrepiece of a new permanent display at Discovery Museum, Newcastle, that will celebrate an important regional and national figure and a significant moment in British history.

It will be located in a new section of the museum’s popular Story of the Tyne gallery, which showcases an extensive maritime collection, covering Tyneside’s shipbuilding industry, innovations in maritime technology, and one of the best ship model collections in the country.

The display will also tell the story of the local men who served in Nelson’s navy – there were over 500 ‘Geordie’ sailors at the Battle of Trafalgar.