The Studio of the Haarlem Painter Pieter Frederik van Os

Mauve was about 18 when he painted this, and still a pupil. The room belonged to his teacher, Pieter Frederik van Os, a Haarlem painter, and Mauve set it down on an ordinary working day. A figure kneels by the fireplace, looking through a pile of drawings. On the walls hang nude studies, the sort every student copied, next to a landscape, and a pair of deer antlers sits above the mantelpiece. Sketches of a goat and a horseshoe give away what Van Os mostly painted, which was animals. Mauve would go on to spend his own career on sheep, cows and horses. He worked in oil on a sheet of paper, later mounted on canvas. On the back an old inscription says that the studio had since become the antiquities room of Haarlem town hall.