Morning Ride along the Beach

Riders on horseback move along a flat beach beneath a wide grey sky, the wet sand catching the pale morning light. Anton Mauve, the leading painter of the Hague School, made the beach at Scheveningen a lifelong subject, and this canvas of 1876 became his most celebrated treatment of it — a favourite of the young Vincent van Gogh, who studied under him. The pearly tone and the unhurried rhythm of the riders give the picture its famous quiet, the quality that earned Mauve the admiration of his contemporaries as the most poetical of Dutch realists.