MANTENIMIENTO || Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat





Anton Mauve (Dutch painter) 1838 - 1888
Bomschuit op het Strand (Fishing Boat on the Beach), 1882
oil on canvas
115 cm x 172 cm. (45.28 x 67.72 in.)
signed r.l.
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague), The Netherlands

This painting is on the beach of Scheveningen.

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Anthonij (Anton) Rudolf Mauve was a Dutch realist painter who was a leading member of the Hague School. He signed his paintings 'A. Mauve' or with a monogrammed 'A.M.'. A master colorist, he was a very significant early influence on his cousin-in-law Vincent van Gogh.
Most of Mauve's work depicts people and animals in outdoor settings. In his Morning Ride in the Rijksmuseum, for example, fashionable equestrians at the seacoast are seen riding away from the viewer. An unconventional detail, horse droppings in the foreground, attests his commitment to realism.
His best known paintings depict peasants working in the fields. His paintings of flocks of sheep were especially popular with American patrons, so popular indeed that a price differential developed between scenes of "sheep coming" and "sheep going".

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Despite the high regard that Vincent van Gogh had for his cousin Anton Mauve (and the strong influence that the elder Mauve had on Vincent's early style), it was only recently that some of the very great reputation that Mauve and his fellow painters of the so-called Hague School enjoyed in their own day has been partly regained. Luckily this Museum owns an important and representative collection of the works of these artists, of whom Mauve is one of the most affecting. Mauve was a master of depicting moist, low places populated by domestic animals and their anonymous keepers. As The Return of the Flock, Laren, so convincingly demonstrates, his ability to control gentle, nearly monochromatic tones, while not losing a sense of either the place or the moment, puts him in direct and happy comparison with the two French artists he most admired: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet. Joseph J. Rishel, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 201.