_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).