Boerenkar op een landweg 1848 - 1888

Anton Mauve painted this watercolor of a farmer’s cart on a country road at an unknown date. The muted palette and desolate landscape, typical of the Hague School, evoke a sense of rural melancholy, but also prompt us to ask: whose landscape is this? Mauve, like many artists of his time, found inspiration in the Dutch countryside. But the image of rural life was also changing due to industrialization and urbanization in the Netherlands. Artists like Mauve, who exhibited at the Pulchri Studio, often looked to the past in order to comment on the present. They did so at a time when new audiences came to museums and galleries. To understand Mauve's art more fully, one might look at the changing economics of Dutch agriculture and cultural debates in the press and academic scholarship on the status of the rural. By understanding these contexts, we can better appreciate the social role of art in the Netherlands.