Sheep Grazing in an Open Field

Around 1900 the keenest buyers of Anton Mauve's sheep were Americans. Mauve had died in 1888, and his flocks were in such demand in the United States that a difference in price is said to have grown up between pictures of sheep coming and pictures of sheep going. The heath around Laren, the village near Hilversum where he spent his last two years, was known as Mauve land as far away as America.

This canvas shows the flock at its most ordinary, heads down and grazing on open ground, with the signature A Mauve at the lower left. The museum gives it no date. It belonged to the Boston businessman Robert Dawson Evans and his wife Maria Antoinette, and a note in the museum's files suggests that a Mauve in their collection came from W. J. Loggen and Son, a dealer in Amsterdam. Mrs. Evans left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1917.