Anton Mauve

The 5th of February, 1889, was the first anniversary of Mauve's death. His friends and admirers met that day at the burial-place near the Canal ~ which runs from The Hague to Scheveningen ~ to unveil a monumental stone, erected by the painter's brother-artists and friends. It was just such a fine silvery and slightly hazy day as the painter himself used to love, and one which exquisitely harmonized with his mind and art. On the day of his burial, almost a year before, it had also been noticed that nature seemed to bestow a last proof of her affection for the sympathetic artist who had adored her in this calm and transparent mood, rather than in her moments of dramatic display. The slab is a simple granite stone, polished only on the side which bears the name, “Anton Mauve, 1838-1888,” and roughly hewn on the top. It stands erect, because the painter's loving wife preferred to have only turf and wild flowers over the resting-place.

A slender birch-tree and a fir had been transplanted from Laren, where the painter spent the last and happiest years of his life. They had been chosen from a group growing not far from his homely cottage, which has been memorized in some of those last superb water-colours, which show the painter at the highest level of his charming art.

The sheep painter, Ter Meulen, Mauve's most fervent admirer, and one might almost say his truest disciple, delivered a short oration full of feeling and that classic simplicity which the master had always loved. He thanked Mauve's brother-in-law, Mr. Le Comte, painter and professor at the Delft Polytechnical Academy, for his sympathetic project of the monument, and made over Mauve's last resting-place to his widow and children.

These scattered flowers on the grave and deposited funeral wreaths. On the turf now grow the daisies and dandelions with which the master often embellished his silvery foregrounds. The simple solemnity of this occasion was not so imposing as that of the burial a year before, but it had a rural charm of its own.

Mauve had died quite unexpectedly at Arnhem, in the Dutch district of Gelderland, at the house of his brother, the “sub-rector” of the gymnasium or high school there. For some days he had been suffering of melancholia or depression of spirits; “my head is weary, I cannot work,” he had complained. But this depression often came over him; every three or four years almost; and sometimes such a period would last for weeks. So the physician advised him to get about a little; and he made a trip to visit some friends and relations in the east of Holland. Aneurism, or some disease of the heart, was the immediate cause of his death.

When the painter was in one of his dejected moods, he felt unable to finish the work he might have in hand, and could only sketch his plans. If the attack were severe he was not even equal to that.