The Modern Dutch School

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Of the landscape painters of modern Holland, the nearest to Corot—nearest in the delicacy of his coloring and in the lyrical note that rings out clearly in all his work—is Anton Mauve (1838-88). The son of a Baptist minister, Mauve was born at Naandam and brought up in a strict Protestant home, where art was not encouraged. It was much against the will of his parents that he eventually took up art, and he made little progress under his first master, Van Os, a dry academic painter whose stiff style had little attraction for his sensitive, rather dreamy pupil. The earliest paintings of Mauve were tightly drawn and highly finished, but later, after he had made the acquaintance of Israels, Willem Maris, and other artists in Amsterdam, he completely changed his style, his handling became looser and broader, and he restricted his palette to delicate greys, greens, light fawns, and pale blues. When he was thirty he exhibited at the Free Society in Brussels, and he was influenced by the French artists who exhibited there, particularly by Corot and by Daubigny, whose works he saw in the house of Mr Mesdag and other places in Holland. Mauve soon began to excel in landscape, rendering the soft hazy atmosphere that lingers over the meadows of Holland with infinite tenderness and poetic truth. The sand dunes near Scheveningen were for many years his favorite sketching-ground, and it was there that he painted one of the most popular of his pictures, ‘The Sand Cart’. It is a painting that captivates us at once by its winning simplicity, its entire truth, and the atmosphere of repose which it exhales; and this reposefulness is a general characteristic of the art of Mauve, though his subjects are usually taken from workday life. We do not think of him primarily as an animal-painter, though his love of animals is made clear by the frequency with which he introduces them into his pictures. But Mauve’s animals never seem to have been painted solely for their own sake; they are part and parcel of the landscape, in which they take a natural place, fulfilling their allotted function as aids to human activity. Each of Mauve’s landscapes has the animals appropriate to it. He painted horses—for many years his ‘Watering Horses,’ belonging to Mr J C J Drucker, was lent to the National Gallery—but he also painted donkeys on the seashore, cows in meadows and on the road, sheep at pasture and in their pens. The fine collection of Mauve’s work in the Mesdag Museum atThe Hague contains examples of all these subjects. Towards the end of his life Mauve painted sheep more frequently than any other animals, the reason being that after living at Amsterdam and The Hague he settled at Laren, which is in the heart of the sheep country to the north-east of Amsterdam. Mauve took all rural and seashore life for his province: he painted fishermen and fishwives at a fish auction on the beach, he painted groups of peasants gathered together at a timber sale, drawing the various types of faces with great insight and humor, but in all his pictures life is pleasant and work proceeds placidly in an atmosphere of peace and contentment.

The Modern Dutch School (continued)