Fishing Boat on the Beach

A white horse stands at the center of this beach scene, harnessed and waiting while fishermen prepare to haul a heavy boat across the sand. Anton Mauve painted teams of horses like these often, animals used along the Dutch coast to drag fishing vessels up from the water or back out to sea. The wooden boat looms large behind them, its mast rising into a pale, overcast sky, while gulls circle overhead and thick ropes snake across the foreground sand.

Mauve was a Dutch painter of the Hague School, a movement known for muted colors and everyday scenes of rural and coastal life in the late 1800s. He also happened to be the cousin by marriage of Vincent van Gogh and gave the younger artist some of his earliest lessons in painting. You can see the family sensibility in the restrained grays and browns here, colors that match the damp, working atmosphere of a fishing beach rather than trying to prettify it. The men in their caps and worn clothes go about their labor without fuss, and the horses, patient and solid, do the quiet heavy lifting of the scene.