Winter Landscape with Sheep

Mauve is best remembered for summer, flocks grazing on sandy heath under a soft grey sky. This canvas belongs to the other half of a shepherd's year. Snow lies on the thatched roofs and on the road between the cottages, and the flock comes up the road towards us, heads down, with the shepherd walking behind it. Two tall, bare trees rise above the farmhouse, and far down the road a single figure is walking away.

Mauve made the picture upright and large, more than a metre high, which gives most of the height to the trees and the winter sky. He signed it at the lower right, A. Mauve, with an f for fecit, made it. No date is known.

Nothing is recorded of the painting's travels before 1922, when it came to the Museum of Fine Arts as the bequest of Miss Ellen Gray. The museum's record names no earlier owner, sale or exhibition.