Led by Anton Mauve, the group of Dutch painters known as the Hague School distinguished itself by its exceptional rendering of moody atmosphere and light. As a Dutch critic wrote of the Hague School in 1875, "The artists try, by preference, to render mood; and they give precedence to tone above color… They have revealed the poetry of gray in a hitherto unprecedented manner." Mauve's A Dutch Road reveals his characteristic "poetry of gray" and his debt to the great Dutch seventeenth-century masters of landscape and the French Realist artist Jean-François Millet (1814-1875). Unlike Millet, who often depicted the struggle of man against nature, Mauve emphasized the bond between them. (http://classes.toledomuseum.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/People$0040273/3;jsessionid=4F6A80A07F13E91FCB7DDBB6F3DF84BC?t:state:flow=7b969222-558b-4b8d-b36c-f89008fa0ce3)