Landscape with sheep

Anton Mauve's 'Landscape with Sheep' (1886) is a characteristic work by the most important animal painter of the Hague School — his sheep in the Dutch landscape constituting one of the most sustained and coherent bodies of work in nineteenth-century Dutch painting. Mauve's sheep were depicted with a quality of observation and affection that went beyond conventional pastoral, and his consistent engagement with these animals over decades gave his work a depth of knowledge that informed every compositional and technical decision. His grey, silvery palette was perfectly suited to the Dutch sheep landscape.

Mauve renders the sheep within their landscape setting with the mastery of thirty years' observation — the sheep's forms, their movement and stillness, their relationship to the ground and sky all depicted with the accuracy of intimate knowledge. His silvery, tonalist palette creates the atmospheric unity of the Dutch grey sky and the green-grey landscape beneath it. His brushwork for the sheep's wool — the specific texture and light absorption of lanolin-rich fleece — is among his most characteristic technical achievements.