2711. WATERING HORSES.
Anton Mauve (Dutch: 1838-1888).
Mauve, one of the favourite landscape-painters of the modern Dutch School, was born at Zaandam, the son of a Baptist minister. He studied art at Amsterdam; his pensive and peaceful landscapes, often combined with horses and other animals, rapidly became popular. "His colour," wrote W. E. Henley, "is quite his own. To a right sense of nature and a mastery of certain atmospheric effects, he unites a genuine strain of poetry. His treatment of animals is at once judicious and affectionate. He is careful to render them in relation to their aerial surroundings; but he has recognised that they too are creatures of character and sentiment, and he loves to paint them in their relations to each other and to man. The sentiment is never forced, the characterisation is never strained, the drama is never exorbitant; the proportions in which they are introduced are so nicely adjusted that the pictorial, the purely artistic qualities of the work are undiminished" (Edinburgh Exhibition Catalogue, 1886).
This picture is a good example of the luminous skies in which Mauve excelled. The sky shines, it has been said, even on a dull day (see an appreciation of Mauve by Frank Rutter in the Studio, vol. 42).