Beltraffio (Lombard: 1467-1516). See 728.
This pretty little picture was shown at the Old Masters' Exhibition of 1870, where Ruskin noted it as an example of the phase in Italian art in which "pictorial perfectness and deliciousness" were sought before everything else (Works, xix. 444-5). "The same model reappears in the profile portrait of a youth (also in the character of Narcissus) in the Uffizi Gallery; again in a profile of San Sebastian in the Frizzoni Collection at Bergamo; and again in a profile drawing in the Louvre" (No. 47a at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1898).
2709. MOTHER AND CHILD.
2710. THE DRAWBRIDGE.
Jacob Maris (Dutch: 1837-1899).
Two small pictures by one of the principal masters of the modern Dutch School. Jacob Maris was born at The Hague. He studied in Paris under Hebert, and exhibited at the Salon from 1862 to 1872, when he returned to The Hague. His figure-studies show, says R. A. M. S., "a perception of the rich but quiet tissue of colour which wraps all Nature if you look at it broadly enough." In landscape he and his brother Matthew are the chief of modern Dutch painters.
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).