Notes
Anton Mauve was a Dutch Romantic painter who, like his friends Jozef Israëls and the three Maris brothers, was profoundly influenced by the French landscape painter Camille Corot and the Barbizon School. At the age of 16 he became a pupil of the cattle painter Pieter Frederik van Os, and later by the painter of horses Wouter Verschuur. In his twenties Mauve joined an artist community in Oosterbeek, a large village in the province Gelderland. About 1870 he settled at The Hague, painting in the neighboring fishing village of Scheveningen. Here, in 1881 and 1882, he taught oil painting to Vincent van Gogh, who was a was a cousin of his wife. In The Hague he became part of a group of artists known as the Hague School, whose members specialized in representing landscapes and scenes of rural life in the Netherlands.

In 1885 he went to live in the country at Laren, near Hilversum, where he brought together a group of landscape painters who came to be known as the “Dutch Barbizon”. Here he focused on painting cattle and flocking sheep roaming around the moors. One of his favorite spots was a strip of wasteland near Laren, which would later be named ‘Mauve’s sand’. Mauve’s pictures are subdued in color and similar to those of Corot in their harmonies of grays and blues.