International studio (33.1907/1908(1908))

THE STUDIO

A CONSIDERATION OF THE
WORK OF ANTON MAUVE.
BY FRANK RUTTER.
Constable had been dead a twelvemonth, Jacob
Maris had been living a year, Corot was a man of
forty-two, Diaz nearing thirty, Troyon was twenty-
eight, Rousseau twenty-six, Millet twenty-four, and
Daubigny just of age, when in 1838 Anton Mauve
was born at Zaandam. Ten years later Barbizon
was discovered, and by the time Mauve had attained
to man’s estate the forest-painters were already
famed among art-students, the avant-courriers of
cultured taste. That France cleared the ground
for Holland, that Mauve and the Marises reaped
where Millet and Rousseau had sown, that the
modern Dutch school of painting was very largely
the outcome of the Romanticist movement in
France, are facts not to be denied. At the same
time it is not difficult to exaggerate their impor-
tance, to attribute to the French masters a greater
influence than they actually exercised at that time,

and to deny to the Dutchmen the full originality
and invention they possessed.
Mauve is a case in point. It must be admitted
that he was not in a large sense a pioneer, that the
thorny path was not his to tread, and for this very
reason his life does not afford the same material
for romance as that of the more militant French-
men. Mauve arrived late on the scene of action,
when the heat of the battle was over. It was his
privilege to join in the pursuit, to share the spoil of
the victors. But it is as well to understand exactly
what that spoil was; it was not the recipe or
formula of a successful painter, it was the growing
public appreciation of honest outdoor painting, of
personal impressions of unconventionalised nature.
If Mauve was not a pioneer, he was no imitator,
not even the disciple of another painter. His art
was distinctly national, its development logical and
personal. To say that he was “ Paris-trained,” as
has been written, is at once inaccurate and mis-
leading. He never lived in Paris, he never worked
there, he paid it comparatively few visits, and these


„ , BY ANTON MAUVE
WATERING HORSES’ (OIL PAINTING)
(From the collection oj J. C.J. Drucker, Esq.)
XXXIII. No. 129.—November, 1907.

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