Anton Mauve. Anthonij Rudolf Mauve was a Dutch realist painter who was a leading member of the Hague School.
He signed his paintings A. Mauve' or with a monogrammed A.M. A master colorist, he was a very significant early influence on his cousin-in-law Vincent van Gogh.
Most of Mauve's work depicts people and animals in outdoor settings. In his Morning Ride in the Rijksmuseum, for example, fashionable equestrians at the seacoast are seen riding away from the viewer.
An unconventional detail, horse droppings in the foreground, attests his commitment to realism. His best known paintings depict peasants working in the fields.
His paintings of flocks of sheep were especially popular with American patrons, so popular indeed that a price differential developed between scenes of sheep coming and sheep going. Anton Mauve was born on 18 September 1838 in Zaandam, a town in the Dutch province of North Holland. A year after his birth, his father Willem Carel Mauve, a Mennonite chaplain, was sent to Haarlem, the capital city of the province where Mauve grew up. He was apprenticed to the painter Pieter Frederik van Os followed by Wouter Verschuur. In his further development he worked with Paul Gabriel, painting from nature, and they regularly stayed and worked together at Oosterbeek, the 'Dutch Barbizon '. He was a friend of Jozef Israels and Willem Maris and, encouraged by their example, he abandoned hi