Studio: international art (42.1908)

Anton Mauve

to read into a pinting ideas which the painter that his tendency was epic rather than lyric. And

never conceived or recorded. Who cannot picture since epic to many suggests sorrow and suffering,

the bewildered astonishment of Leonardo when just as lyric does joy and gladness, the rest was

Pater in Elysium reads him his too eloquent easy. Then by another association of ideas, that

appreciation of La Gioconda 1 Mauve's art is of sorrow with shadow, a second misconception

serious, pensive if you like, but pensiveness is was brought to birth, and the " sorrow-laden " work

not necessarily melancholy or sadness. It may of Mauve was spoken of uniformly as low-toned,

be a deep, though quiet, abiding joy. Sadness or Now all tones are relative, and a middle period

melancholy implies discontent, if resigned; but the Mauve may be low in tone compared to a late

Titanic element is almost wholly absent in Mauve, Turner or a Monet; but it is high compared to a

and the greater number of his reveries seem to me Rembrandt or a Jacob Maris. With a Boudin it

inspired by peaceful, contented contemplation, is about on a level, and Boudin is not usually

We can be sympathetic without being pessimists, considered a low-toned painter. The truth is that

and it does not lessen the beauty, nor should it Mauve, beginning in the bass, played for the best

our appreciation, of Mauve's work if we find no part of his life on the middle notes of the colour

" sense of suffering " in the two cows the boy is scale. There are low-toned paintings by him just

driving Homeward (page 14), no "undertone of as there are in some of them figures, like the

sadness " in the woman who comes with her pail to tired, worn peasant of the Shepherd and Flock

the cows at Milking Time (page 10), poetry but no (supplement), which do convey a sense of sad

melancholy in the Interior of a Barn (frontispiece), endurance. Still the characteristics of a painter's

To have nothing better to think about this last art are not to be deduced from isolated examples,

than the melancholy fact that sheep are fed and but from the bulk of his work; and to look

kept warm only that they may afford raiment without preconceived notions at a number of

and food for man, is to read a false literary Mauves is to recognise that his painting was

motive into a work that has a true pictorial no more low-toned, in the strict sense of the

appeal. We must not confuse what may happen word, than it as " strongly marked" by the

to interest us with what primarily interests the influence of Millet.

painter, light giving colour to form. The two chief excellences of Mauve, derived

I imagine this melancholy misconception about wholly from the keenness of his own perceptions

Mauve originally arose from some critic observing and his power to record them aright, are the

"THE HILLSIDE" (OIL PAINTING)

BY ANION MAUVE
13