Antonie Franciscus Dona is one of The Hague's first romantic painters. Not much is known about his life. He was born in 1802 and studied drawing at the academy in The Hague, where he later became a teacher himself. Like contemporaries such as Willem Bodeman, B.C. Koekkoek and Adrianus van der Koogh, he painted moody, accurately detailed landscapes, but also excelled in depicting livestock. He was a teacher of, among others, the cattle painter Willem Karel Nakken.