The Studio [antikvár]

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 importance, 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 Frenchmen. 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 misleading. He never lived in Paris, he never worked there, he paid it comparatively few visits, and these 'watering horsks" (oil painting) (From the collection of J. C.J. Drucker, Esq.) XLII. No. 175.—October, 1907.