Plough

Anton Mauve's 'Plough' (1887) depicts one of the fundamental implements of agricultural life — the plough as both tool and symbol of the eternal relationship between human labor and the earth. Mauve's engagement with the plough as a subject connected him to the broader Hague School interest in the rural working world and to the French Barbizon tradition of Millet's peasant subjects. The plough without its team, or with horses and ploughman working the Dutch soil, was a subject that combined social observation with the deeper resonance of cultivation as a human activity reaching back to the beginnings of civilization.

Mauve renders the plough subject with his characteristic atmospheric sensitivity and grey-toned palette — whether the implement is shown in isolation or with the plough team working the field, his handling creates the Dutch atmospheric context of diffused light and vast sky above flat cultivated land. His brushwork for the dark earth turned by the plough, the horses' forms, and the Dutch agricultural landscape reflects his sustained engagement with this subject world.