The Return to the Fold

Mauve was a leading member of the Hague school, the Dutch counterpart to the Barbizon school of painters in France. He painted everyday subjects drawn from his local landscape in southwest Holland. This work depicts one of Mauve’s favorite and most popular subjects, a shepherd and his flock. Prices varied depending on whether the picture featured "sheep coming," or, as here, the slightly less expensive "sheep going." Vincent van Gogh, who was the cousin of Mauve’s wife, studied with Mauve in the winter of 1881–82, and admired him as "a great interpreter of the fine gray Dutch countryside."