Seaweed Gatherer

The only date this little panel has comes from a dealer's stock book. On 9 February 1874 the Paris firm Goupil and Company bought it in The Hague, gave it stock number 8757, and wrote it down simply as Plage et chariot, beach and cart. So the museum dates it before 1874 and no closer.

It is barely 30 centimetres wide. A grey horse stands on the wet sand with a heavy two-wheeled cart behind it, the driver hunched on top, and the North Sea rolling in under a pale sky. Carts like this went down onto the beach to gather the seaweed the tide left behind. Mauve signed it at the lower right.

Goupil kept it for more than four years. In September 1878 the firm sold it to Thomas Gold Appleton, a Boston writer and collector who bought a good deal of modern French and Dutch painting, and it passed to his nephew, who left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1923.