Tafels op een strand 1848 - 1888

Anton Mauve made this pencil drawing, "Tables on a Beach," sometime in the second half of the 19th century. Mauve was a leading artist in the Hague School, which saw the Dutch landscape as a source of national identity. In this quick sketch, he uses a minimum of lines to explore the bare essentials of the scene, possibly as preparation for a larger painting. The image can tell us a lot about the rising middle classes of the Netherlands at this time. Coastal towns like Scheveningen were transforming into popular tourist destinations. The image hints at how leisure and recreation were becoming more commercialized. We can see orderly rows of beach chairs suggesting the development of a service industry catering to the growing numbers of visitors. Historians use sources like tourist guides, local newspapers, and hotel registers to understand the relationship between art and social change in the nineteenth century. These resources can offer new insights into the history and meaning of works like this one.