Anton Mauve

"Heavenly wonderfully beautiful that Wolfhezerland with its stream and pines.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"At first I did not feel much inclined to agree [ Willem Maris had asked Mauve to paint together in open air, around the village Oosterbeek, c. 1863], but I did not like to refuse the little fellow flatly, so we went off together. My companion did not suffer from loquacity; and, coming to a field with cows in it, I sat down to go on with a drawing which I had begun that morning. The little chap [Willem Maris] strolled around a bit and then settled down to work himself. We sat there for hours under the pollards, until I grew curious to see what the little fellow was at. He sat sketching with a bit of chalk; but, oh! I stood astounded. I seized him by the hand and stammered in my turn, 'My boy, what an artist you are! You stagger me! It's magnificent!'"

"I've got a special liking for stables. I find them so very suitable for creating an artistique feeling, and then those stables from Oosterbeek! (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"As far as my work concerned, I am busy with a few small paintings, one is ordered and the other I have to 'adventure'. More and more I feel that I am short of so many studies, if I had the money, I didn't make any painting next year, I would only study [sketches]; but well, you have to make the best of a bad job, it will be hard enough to enable myself a living. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"How are you doing, make a good, simple [and] true thing, for example.. .I believe I have found a good place for it. Namely, I spoke Mr. about you and he expressed his wish that you should show him something good.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Dear friend! I am still staying in Oosterbeek as you can see but I will now leave in 2 days. The last days I spent on two small paintings ordered by Mr. de Visser. I painted them in a happy atmosphere.. .I send them to you because they were still wet when I sent them away and I could hardly do that to Mr. de Visser. Please, do you want to give them a layer of egg-varnish and when you discover here or there a badly seen dash, or you see a chance to make a witty thing in the paintings, oh chap, I pray you do so, because if he doesn't like them, I'll get no bread and have nasty problems, because I need the money so badly.. (translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Nowadays I make ugly things, but I think they are nevertheless better than before, more made out-of-me myself, just simple cows with air and greenishness. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"I really want to talk to you a lot, but what do I have to do? I still have things in progress here, two paintings and [I] must necessarily study sheep. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"..it is really beautiful here with that freezing weather. o you should see now the distance, and the fields with their black earth and flat shadows it would strike you, how lovely the sun is shining in the Betuwe.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

".never in my life I have seen such a truly sad thing [an atmosphere at Wolfheze ]. A mother heartbroken about the loss of her only child is nothing compared to this. A broad streak or strip in front of you, which becomes blacker and blacker towards the horizon. a mysterious ticking and hissing of rain drops which keep hanging halfway the heather plant on each twig and sprout.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Come on, don't wait, come! Or don't you like to roll into the lush grass? I really would like to be completely a cow, to feel in that way the childish fun that such a beast gets when it is running about in the pasture and makes all that kind of silly jumps with its tail high in the air. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"..coloring is also drawing."

"..the longer I am here Laren, the more beautiful it becomes for me and now that I feel myself more comfortable, I can judge it better.. .It is touching beautiful here [ Laren ], with a delicacy of lines and lovely poetry radiates from everywhere, interior houses, roads, fields, beautiful heath and bushes, and people are of the sweetest kind to imagine.. .Usually after dinner we make a little walk, what I enjoy a lot. I don't know how to say it, but I would like to live here for ever. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"You're too close to your model."

"This is how you should hold your palette."

"our Goddess [how painting is going] is sometimes so erratic, just when you want to speak to her, she is hiding and if you did not immediately think of her, she comes to give hanks incessantly and is so kind, anyway - we shall see.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Our plans were to go to Amsterdam and Laren tomorrow and then spend another day with you.. .I am very busy again with 7 paintings at the same time, I still have a lot to do before I can go to Laren, going to live there. Now, this week I can say it more confidently, - when we find a suitable location.. .We are on a leap of eating out therefore this scribbling.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Take care for this, don't start with the sentiment first, [because] that's where a piece of art is ending with - but the good start is drawing good and right. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"I am busy working on a large painting with sheep; the last days I am working with real pleasure, the weather is.. ..not too hot and with nice skies. It's great here!!!! I shout with joy the whole day and more and more I desire to stay here until the end. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"I ordered Major [transport company] tomorrow afternoon 2 o'clock to pack the paintings, I am still completely in all the paintings - as nightmares they are flying around me, now you know as of old how that is, but tomorrow afternoon at 2 o'clock I am free. I believe there are nice things among them, the drawing has become a little too fat, but there is much good in it, and it is very well-finished. I send to Peacock. The forest with wood hackers, which was hanging above the door of my studio, then the sheep [small composition-sketch of a sheep herd with shepherd] and.. .I believe you know them all, 7 pieces together, afterwards I have to start working for Arnold & Tripp [art-sellers in Paris], I let those guys wait and that's not right to do.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"All my canvases I paint after sketches. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"When entering a studio the most pleasant thing to see is a blank canvas. It looks so inviting to make a start, you are fresh and hoping for the best. Then a terrible time follows when everything seems lost and ruined, you fear you will never get it done, than suddenly a ray of light! And it seems you get what you wanted to tell. My best works usually are going trough such a struggle. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Just follow the lead of the Dutch seventeenth-century master-painters, we have to look at the country around us in the way the old masters did. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Hereby I send you back the 'Winter' [a painting]. I hope you will be better satisfied now. After alternately smashing away and adding on the cart some new figures, finally this one climbed up, which I hope will do better than its predecessors.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"You go outside, light your pipe, whistle a tune and just paint what you come across. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"I spent an afternoon and part of an evening at Mauve’s and saw many beautiful things in his studio. My own drawings interested Mauve more. He gave me a great many suggestions, which I'm glad of, and I've sort of arranged to pay him another visit fairly soon when I have some more studies. He showed me a whole batch of his studies and explained them to me - not sketches for drawings or designs for paintings but true study sheets, apparently insignificant. He wants me to start painting."

"There's a Mauve, the large painting of the pink being dragged onto the dunes [at the Dutch coast near The Hague], it's a masterpiece. I've never heard a good sermon about resignation nor been able to imagine one, except for this painting by Mauve and the work of Millet. It is indeed resignation, but the true kind, not that of the clergymen. Those nags, those poor, sorry-looking nags, black, white, brown, they stand there, patiently submissive, willing, resigned, still. They'll soon have to drag the heavy boat the last bit of the way, the job's almost done. They stand still for a moment, they pant, they're covered in sweat, but they don't murmur, they don't protest – they don't complain – about anything. They're long past that, years ago already. They're resigned to living and working a while longer, but if they have to go to the knacker's yard tomorrow, so be it, they're ready for it. I find such a wonderfully elevated, practical, wordless philosophy in this painting.. .It seems to me that this painting by Mauve would be one of those rare paintings which Millet would stand in front of for a long time, mumbling to himself, 'he has a good heart, that painter'."

"Because I had started [his sketch in oil, in the dunes] before the storm on my knees with a low horizon, I now had to kneel down in the mud.. .The outcome this time was that I was able to take that piece of ground with me to the studio — although Mauve rightly said to me when we were discussing one of his studies that it's a job to draw clods of earth and to get depth into them."

"..it's a pity that he [Anton Mauve] is so limited, he was here Sunday and Monday and I talked to him a lot, I think he is a bit of a week; very sensitive, a warm man, but so simple and round. Yet I thought he was even more limited, he admitted that direction [in painting] is nonsense and that everything depends on personality; he strongly advised me to paint many large figures in open air; don't talk about it to anyone: it's nobody's business.. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Anton has gone again through a period of nerve weakness.. ..he had no rest at all or I had to be with him, walking a lot and talking all the time, but try to comfort and especially look like a happy person.. ..but the worst is over now and this morning he was calm again on a great walk we made together, and he felt such a strong feeling of happiness and gratitude. You can't believe how childlike he can be then and how delighted he can enjoy life.. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"..the true quiet nature [of] Laren, that was where he believed to be able to live fresh.. .His health improved a lot. Perhaps because the work was bowling along or it was the air of Laren, I don't know. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

".I thought you knew [that] I don't admire the man [Anton Mauve] himself, but I find him clever and he is the only person who feels for nature what I have carried in myself for so long.. ..that notions of infinite wealth of true happiness that can atwinkle a person when he sees something beautiful that stirs him to his soul by that peculiar charm.. ..and Mauve was the first one with whom I found that resonance and who can feel the same indescribable pleasure on a beautiful day outside and it's a nice thing to walk around with someone who starts glowing for a piece of heather and a few trees as I do.. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"I'd worked on a canvas in the open air in an orchard — ploughed lilac field, a reed fence — two pink peach trees against a glorious blue and white sky. Probably the best landscape I've done. Just as I brought it home I received from our sister [Willemien] a piece in Dutch dedicated to Mauve's memory.. ..something or other grabbed hold of me and made my throat tight with emotion, and I wrote on my painting: 'Souvenir de Mauve - Vincent & Theo' - and if you think it's good as it stands we'll send it to Mrs. [Jet] Mauve in both our names. I deliberately took the best study I've made here.. .It seemed to me that in memory of Mauve we needed something that was both tender and very cheerful.."

"But Mauve is not dead! When we walk in those pretty country lanes under the birch trees, with their silvery leaves and pearly aspect; when we watch the sun caressing the green meadows and playing about among the branches of the willow, or over the alder and hazel trees; when we hear the echo of the tinkling bell of the sheep on the heath, we say: 'Mauve lives, he is here, he is here!'"

"Many times - sometimes in the middle of a conversation - he stopped walking, to attach in one single pull something that struck him outdoors on the paper: a tree, a ditch, a cloudy shadow, the position of a sheep or cow. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Whoever knew Mauve closely knows how much time he spent on such paintings; how many walks and studies were needed to renew his impression and to settle it, and how difficult he decided to separate himself from such a canvas, even so strongly that, when the canvas was carried out of his house, he still kept working on it in the hallway. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"[Loffelt tells how Mauve, c. 1880] studied with full attention and sympathy [the work of] Millet in an extensive collection of photographic images [of Millet's work] that belonged to his house gods. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"..the [art-]dealers were constantly demanding more, so that Mauve would sometimes jestingly speak of his studio as 'the Great Factory'.."

"It was not the cart as such but a part of life itself that he saw in that image. It was probably more the swinging and thumping trip of such a cart, the grinding of the wheels and the sliding out on the axles, the slow, cozy, quiet going forward, with the wandering old man aside and the loom trudging horse in front of the cart. Not a cart with a horse, but how such a clump of reality was lugging along the road as an intimately coherent something, the unity in that moving forward and the poetic quietness that he felt in it; that's what he wanted to express. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Studio in the Miss Idastraat [in The Hague]. - Now you must not think that our studio [of Willem Maris, Mauve and other artists, 1860's] was so special. It was on the sunny side - and we had to deal with only a second window that you opened and closed according to whether it was sunny or cloudy. A gymnastics master lived below. There his pupils were practicing diligently on the rings: bòns, bòns. And above us lived a ... trombonist. Then Mauve sometimes, mad with anger, stood pounding his painting-stick against the floor and attic: 'You will stop now at last!' (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Mauve had a tendency for that! - painting it all over. Once they brought him a canvas from that art dealer, who it was I don't remember any more. Was he willing to touch up a little those tree branches? 'Just lay it down!' he says, 'I'll do it in a minute'. A few minutes later he went upstairs for the job - just doing that branches a little, ... but wait, I better pull the air over them, Like that, right! Oh, actually the whole tree can better be removed. And the ground brushed through. But wait a minute, that figurine there ... Shortly afterwards the art dealer comes up. 'How do you like it?' asks Mauve. 'Very well!' the requested says, but where is the other painting? (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"sometimes they went away [the cows in Oosterbeek] before he started and sometimes [they were] so quiet and unmovable that he had to shout to start them moving, otherwise his conscience wouldn't allow him to declare the study as finished. (translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)"